June update

I have a feeling this will be the 9-year-old's room before we get to it, but I am making progress on other fronts. I have taken to following http://www.flylady.net/ who is "your personal on-line coach to help you gain control of your house and home."
My husband is amazed at the state of the first floor but he worries it is "unsustainable." He doesn't realize that FLYlady's trick is to get folks to tidy up just 15 minutes at a time. She says you can do anything for 15 minutes. She also says, "If it's fun, it will get done." Check her out; she and her helpers are fun and have lots of great tips.

The 8-year-olds' room

Dare I attempt to declutter my son's room? We had a radical thought that we would completely empty out the room into our "swing space," (the former garage, which is fairly empty) and not put back anything that isn't age-appropriate and really fun.

Office decuttered enough, for now

This took all day. The last 5/8ths of the office. Found some cool things I'd lost for a while.

Feels good to have a clear place to work. Onward!

Step One - The Office

Friday morning found me up at 5:20 vacuuming and starting the tedious and mentally exhausting process of decluttering my office. I took a lot of magazines and paper to the recycling center, spent way too much time reading old term papers, and found an October 2005 Entrepreneur Magazine article about how decluttering your office reenergizes everything. I've cleaned up about 3/8ths of the office, as seen above. This is HARD. I'm not really throwing out everything that needs to be thrown out in all the file folders. I'll save that for deep-declutter later on. But I have only one box under the drafting table, as opposed to five before. I know that a lot of vendor information can be accessed on-line, and that should give me courage to recycle the binders and folders.

One thing that is hard is passing all clutter in the house on the way down to my office. Focusing on just one area when so many are crying out for attention is necessary, but again, for me, hard.

The good news is that the 3/8ths of my office fairly under control feel pretty inspiring.

My first project

I'm doing full disclosure here. This is my home office and it's out of control. Yikes! One of the big things I read in several of these books is the need to pare down and reduce clutter.

From Sarah Susanka: "Our lives have lots of leftover piles and patterns..., and in order to implement the blueprint for your own Not So Big Life these must also be identified and dispatched. There's an amazing amount of wasted space and time in our lives, which, when cleaned out, reveals a lot more room to work with for our life remodeling."

From Karen Kingston: "The word 'clutter' derives from the Middle English word 'clotter,' which means to coagulate -- and that's about as stuck as you can get. Clutter accumulates when energy stagnates and, likewise, energy stagnates when clutter accumulates. So the clutter begins as a symptom of what is happening with you in your life and then becomes part of the problem itself because the more of it you have, the more stagnant energy it attracts to itself."

I have a serious problem here. Hard to work when I can't find the keyboard. Today I will tackle one corner of the office and see what happens.

Practicing what I read

Sometimes I just need a jumpstart to get into a project, something cataclysmic, like a public declaration to change my life. Not that my life isn't great, it's pretty darn cool, (I love my family! My friends! Where we live! What I do!) But every machine needs a tune up once in a while, and I'm due.

I've decided to challenge myself to follow - for three months, the season of spring and new beginnings - the credos of seven of the self-help books that have been cluttering up my shelf. It's a crazy bunch, but nearly every word rings true for me, at least. Some I have read and devoured, others are new and I'm just starting to go through them. But they cover the bases of what I'm looking to improve.

In alphabetical order:

Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, by Karen Kingston, 1999.

Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen, 2001.

Healthy Cooking Basics, WeightWatchers Momentum Program, 2009.

the not so big life, making room for what really matters, by Sarah Susanka, 2007.

Sidetracked Home Executives, From Pigpen to Paradise, by Pam Young and Peggy Jones, 2001.

The Complete Tightwad Gazette, Promoting Thrift as a Viable Alternative Lifestyle, by Amy Dacyczyn, 1998.

Your Money or Your Life, Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, 1993.

It's a list that will keep me busy, trying to improve my physical, financial well being and give space for the spiritual to bloom.

Those are pretty vague goals, so here's where I hope to be more specific:

Physical - Lose extra pounds and get my BMI below 25. Learn how to hit a softball just over the third baseperson's head.

Financial - Get my taxes done, income up, and spending below income. (Short sentence, very long procedure.)

And whatever else comes up. Wish me luck.