Goal 9: Getting Our House In Order

I haven't checked in with my 2011 goals in quite a while, but lately I've been all about goal 9: Getting Our House In Order. Matt and I spent the weekend before last cleaning and rearranging our living room, FINALLY finding permanent homes for the furniture we inherited from his mom and making it look a lot more orderly in here. And I can't even tell you what a huge relief it is not to have to navigate around that huge sofa (and all of the clutter that formed up on and around it) every time we walk through the room.

I didn't bother taking before & after pictures, partly because the before embarrassed me so much (it was pretty bad), but also because we still have all of the old hand-me-down and pre-fab furniture left over from our twenties. So nothing exciting happened decor wise (other than putting out some fall and Halloween decorations); we just made better use of our space. But even though Better Homes & Gardens won't be knocking on our door to do a photo shoot any time soon, the living room looks so much better than it did, and it's so much more comfortable and homey. We're actually hanging out in here instead of spending all of our time in the back of the house. And I'm thrilled that there's actually enough floor space for me to do workout DVDs when the weather turns too cold to keep up my walking routine.

Apart from that, I've been spending most of my time over the last week and a half cleaning and rearranging my office. I'll go into more detail about that over at my other blog, but I'll say here that I can't believe what a huge undertaking that turned out to be. I'm trying to get rid of about half of what's crammed in there, but right now "getting rid of stuff" means moving it to the garage until I have time to haul it off to the recycling place/the Salvation Army/the used book store/eBay/whatever, and I'm running into the problem that our garage is already filled nearly to the brim with my late in-laws' things, and I'm quickly running out of temporary storage. So one of my big goals for next year will definitely be to clean out our garage and deal with all of the stuff we had to bring over from their apartment. Also, to finally buy a ladder so we can access our attic, which I totally forgot we even had until the other day when my mom asked why we don't put some of their stuff up there. But the cord on the pull-down door/ladder thing is missing, and without a ladder, we might as well not have an attic.

Yes, we've been here three years now, and we're still getting used to actually living in our very own house. By the way, we also have a shed, but the doors don't close, so we don't keep stuff in there, either. Fixing that might also be on next year's goal list.

Meanwhile, I'll keep working on my office and being mystified at how two people can barely cram all of their crap into a three-bedroom house. As it stands I have no idea where we'll put a baby if we actually manage to have one.