Organize and Beautify
I recently made my family watch The Minimalists – Ted Talks on You Tube. to try and get them to understand we don’t need things to make us happy. Things like a drawing made when they were 3 or the toys from Happy Meals circa 2009.
Since our kids are 9, 12, and 14 I felt they could understand why I showed it to them and what it meant. In theory they all seemed to grasp the concept. But when I started discussing how we were going to go through the house and purge things we didn’t need it appeared I may have overestimated them.
Frankly, no one in the house “gets it.”
Everyone nodded their heads and said they grasped the concept but then went about their day and promptly forgot all about it.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t mean for us to become minimalists. No way…I like my stuff.
My point was to try and show them how we don’t need to accumulate so much crap. I can’t take the messy clutter anymore and the fact that I’m the only person in a house of 5 that apparently knows how to load the dishwasher doesn’t help. Do they think a fairy comes in at night and loads all the dishes from the sink to the dishwasher while they’re sleeping? Though my daughter did try to make a case for everyone to load and unload the dishes they use only. You know because that was “fair.”
While everyone else mentally rolled their eyes waiting for me to stop complaining about the mess in everyone’s room my 9 year old jumped on the bandwagon. Well, sort of. My daughter is a skilled negotiator, she’s shrewd, and knows how to work the system to get what she wants.
Under the guise of minimizing she conned me into buying her some pretty cube organizers. This happened about 5 minutes after I gave the speech that now that Christmas was over I wasn’t spending a dime on non-essentials because we needed to save money. But when she told me her plan I couldn’t argue. All her storage pieces were old hand-me-down shelves from her brother and she promised if I bought her new shelving she would get rid of some stuff.
Sucker that I am we went all over town to look at shelving. Yes, we could have searched on the web but she’s old fashioned and wanted to SEE it in person. You know, to make sure it was exactly what she envisioned.
She found the cube storage she wanted and it wasn’t badly priced at all so we got what she wanted and headed home.
ClosetMaid 421 Cubeicals 9-Cube Organizer, White
After she hounded my fiancé to put it together for her, her room went from this:
To this:
Once I saw what it looked like, I didn’t mind spending the money at all. The transformation was fantastic. So much so that I went back and bought a few of the storage pieces for other rooms in our house.
I’m still waging the war on clutter but there’s always hope.
What are some of your tips and tricks to managing the clutter?
header photo image credit unsplash
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