improvement

Organization. Well. There has definitely been some of that this past month. Not all the places I had thought about when I first wrote about my May goal. I had a lot more plans for organizing places within my house. However, the one place I really wanted to get to was the garage. And so I did. 

I can't say that I got rid of everything I probably "should" have. But I cleared out what I could, which is actually quite a decent pile. When things have been in storage for so long it gets easier to part with them, knowing that I don't really use them. Also. seeing them from the distance of time makes some things lose their sentimentality, which is the thing that gets me more than anything else. Take the following "treasures" for example.

my miniature pencil collection

another assortment of things

I love these dolls! They still smell like berries and vanilla.

 
I consolidated lots of things. 
I took out things that I really like, deciding that there's no point keeping something like that in a box. Those kinds of things I should use or lose.
And I reorganized the stuff that we are keeping so that it takes up less space. I also made sure to label things very well. 

The only things I haven't gone through are our books. We have about 12 boxes of books in the garage. That's a together job and one I'd like to do after the rest of the garage is clear again. They are all in one spot. They're not going anywhere. They can wait a little while longer.

This was definitely a huge task and one that, at times, seemed unimportant. Why clean out the garage if most of the stuff was going to stay in boxes anyway? The thing is, the garage was getting out of control unorganized and keeping it maintained in any way was becoming impossible. So that was number one reason to take on this task. The other was because there are things I have thought about having out over this past year and a half. Things I'd like to look at in my daily life. When we first came here we didn't know how long we'd be here and it made sense to keep most things packed. At this point, we've been here long enough that I have started to want more of those extras out and about.

There are still things to be done on this project. Getting rid of the pile of "to go" things seems to be the worst of them. Also, finding homes for the things I have taken out will be an interesting task also. I think that is where the book Organizing from the Inside Out
is really going to come in handy. The method the author sets out involves analyzing why you have things, looking at current systems for what's working and what's not and creating better functioning spaces for what you need. We'll see how sustainable that is when we get to that part.

For now, I'm going to focus on making the garage habitable for a car again. And revel in the joy of having made vast improvements in our garage space! 

before

after