2014 is a New Start

Wouldn't life be grand if the toy area always looked like this? These are the bulk of our toys post "The Great Toy Purge of 2013". 

Treavor and I got a head start on the New Year toward the end of December 2013. You see, we have five sets of people/family units/relations coming to stay with us in first six weeks of this year, and being the Messies we are, the house needed a good shake down. In fact, Christmas Day's evening was spent initiating a toy purge. We have done this for the third year running and it. is. awesome. We go through toys, ditch the ones that have been long forgotten, throw away the bent paper airplanes, broken action figures and dust bunnies...and then consider our storage space (with the goal being not to buy more boxes to fill, but to stay within those boundaries instead).  It was so liberating, as it always is.

From that day on, we spent a good part of each day sifting through piles of papers, pulling out guest blankets and sheets, rearranging, and cleaning. We even enlisted a friend to help (one whose gifting it is to be a great organizer and cleaner!).

So, when our friends Glen and Kat arrived last Saturday to stay for the week, we felt like we could finally breathe and not have to wish with baited breath that they wouldn't open our cupboards and find themselves at the bottom of the junk pile that had just fallen on them.  We are working on being hospitable and tidy people.  Help us, Jesus.

I can't tell you enough, but it is so wonderful to have clean, empty spaces!  Growing up, it was my tendency to feel like a shelf or a table or a space was for filling with some kind of junk. Can anyone else relate? It was as if an empty table was screaming, "PLEASE put junk mail and books and papers and all your loose change, etc. etc. etc. on me!"

It has been a week since we rearranged almost every corner of this house, and there have been a few lazy days of not putting things away as we have rushed from this meeting to this meal to that errand, etc.  The clutter is starting to, well, clutter up our empty spaces.  One week into our New Year and it already seems we're back to our old ways.  We didn't make a resolution, exactly, but are wanting to seriously change our ways so that our children don't inherit our messy tendencies and struggle with it for the rest of their lives. 

Have any tips for us? Leave a comment below...or you can just wallow around in the dilemma with us and leave me with an "Amen!" if you're struggling with the same thing.  Either way, I'd love to hear from ya!

Here's to a brand spankin' New Year!  God's got some wild things in store for us here, I just know it!

Thanks for reading,
Alina