I haven’t been around here recently nearly as much as I’ve been in the past. Part of that is due to a conscious restructuring of my time (I’m playing the piano a lot more – holla!), but part of it is because something really big has been going on that’s been taking up every not-otherwise-occupied moment of my time.

But now, it is done. It is finished and complete and the weight of the world is off my shoulders and I feel SO FREAKIN’ GOOD about it, I can finally declare it to all of the internet world:
MY HOUSE HAS BEEN DECLUTTERED. !!!!!!!!!!

What? You were expecting other momentous news?

THIS IS EXTREMELY MOMENTOUS NEWS! For the first time in – ever? – I’m actually happy with my house and what’s in it. This is big, people. Really big.

Nearly every time she’d come over for dinner (which was several times a month), my grandmother would comment on how our house was too small for us; we needed more space. And every time, we’d laugh and reassure her that we loved our house – it was plenty big for us – and as soon as we took the time to do some reorganizing and purging, it would feel much more spacious. Taking that time, however, proved elusive.

We were probably destined to go on much as we always had if not for the convergence of two things this summer: the plan to add on a mudroom and my learning about Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The former has been a longtime dream of ours. It’s tough to live in Rochester, where snow is plentiful and mud season is long, without any kind of mudroom.

Additionally, one of the main entries into our house (and the only one that the dogs access) is directly from the garage into the kitchen – meaning that the kitchen is constantly filled with mud, leaves, dirt, etc. Add to that a general lack of storage (see: dog kennels in the dining room, Nick’s and my coats hung on the side of a kitchen cupboard…) and we’ve been itching to create a space for our coats and winter gear, the dog kennels and food, and the girls’ backpacks and school accoutrements. After speaking with an architect and drawing up some plans, we were on our way to making our dreams become reality.

In order to do so, we knew we’d have to make some changes. Specifically, the stuff in the garage would need to be stored somewhere during the construction – ideally inside – meaning we had to have space to hold it. Thus, the first bit of inspiration: in order to make space, we should probably, like, get rid of some of our current stuff. Simultaneously this summer, we were unexpectedly the recipients of some furniture from my grandma’s apartment, so we had to make room for new (to us) couches, too – which involved a lot of shifting our current furniture around and getting rid of other pieces.

This might have gone off fairly smoothly and quickly had it not been for the second bit of inspiration: the book. Three different people, on three separate occasions, mentioned to me that they had read Ms. Kondo’s book – which (I’m paraphrasing here ever so slightly) instructs folks to go through all of the items in their house in a particular order and keep only the things which “spark joy.” Each of these three friends said that this advice was, indeed, life-changing, and that they loved what this particular style of decluttering had brought to their lives.

Exhibit A: the area underneath the fish tank that had been used to store games.

Exhibits B and C: games now stored on bookshelf (books previously on shelf = donated), shelves and storage bins beneath fish tank for cold weather gear, school supplies, etc.

I didn’t then have a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (my mom gave me one a couple of weeks ago – yay!), but my friends spoke so highly of it, I spent a lot of time with my boyfriend, Google, trying to determine whether or not the KonMari method might work for me. I read articles, listened to interviews with Ms. Kondo, and watched countless YouTube videos on her clothing-folding method (yes, there’s a method. And many, many videos… the internet is a strange place, y’all). As I did my research (so official, no?), I came to the conclusion that I could totally get behind her approach. BRING IT ON.

New folding method. Not sure how long this will last; check back in a month.

And so, while we emptied out corners of the house to hold the stuff from our garage and rearranged furniture and replaced old carpeting with laminate flooring, I made a conscious effort to approach each reorganization and clean-out using (what I hope is) Marie Kondo’s plan.

Which means I went through everything in our house. No, I mean Every. Single. Thing*. I opened every drawer, every closet, every cupboard and took out every single item, held it in my hands, and determined whether or not it brought me enough joy to keep it. Every baking dish, every linen napkin, every bottle of nail polish, every board game, every mitten, every ornament. EVERY. THING. If the items made me happy (photographs) or were useful/necessary (staplers, Spanx), I kept them. If they didn’t fit those criteria, they were donated or trashed.
*except the things in the girls’ rooms. It’s crazy up in there, yo. That’s on them.


Found these in the bookshelf. THIS WAS LIFE BEFORE GOOGLE. Good grief.

It took nearly six weeks, but it happened. One day, the kitchen cabinets and the area under the sink. Another, the drawers and cupboards in the girls’ bathrooms. The dining room hutch. The living room shelves. The front hall closet. Lastly came the basement, which held storage-y things like decorations and tools, but also the part that, according to Ms. Kondo, would be the hardest: memories. Photos and love letters and the boxes of my childhood mementos containing everything from first grade report cards to every single notebook and paper from every single class I took in college; EVERY SINGLE CLASS WTF.

It was the simple concept of Sparking Joy that made the clean-out process both easy and relieving. I hadn’t known just how many things I’d saved over the years because I thought I should — unused gifts from extremely kind and good-hearted friends, expensive kitchen gadgets that I’d felt guilty ditching, clothes that had made me smile but didn’t anymore. Once I realized that they were no longer making me happy but that they’d served their purpose (I loved remembering how wonderful it felt receiving the gifts, being thought of in such a sweet way; how excited I’d been for the kitchen tools, etc.), I felt completely comfortable in letting go of more stuff than I’d imagined possible. The same, surprisingly, went for my childhood mementos. (Full disclosure: I kept all of our photographs, every last one. They still spark joy.)

Also kept: these, from my original cassette collection. 
Forget sparking joy; these are ON FIRE.

Taking up more space than anything else were my teaching boxes. If you’ve ever lived with a teacher, you know how much stuff we accumulate. Resources, ideas, professional development certificates, letters from former students and parents. It spanned my days as a K-8 music teacher, 5-6 homeroom teacher, 2nd grade teacher, and middle school music teacher — eleven years of papers, tests, quizzes, syllabi, transparencies, lesson plans, IEPs, meetings, goals, comic strips, and communications.

And that doesn’t touch on the textbooks, lesson books, planning books, references, gradebooks, three-ring binders, CDs, cassettes, office supplies, classroom posters (my favorite: “You can’t scare me. I teach.”), decorations, or hats (yes, an entire box of dress-up hats; teaching elementary music, these are essential, I tell you). Basically, when you’re a teacher, you need to assign an entire room of your house to hold all of your materials.

Once I finally accepted that, in all likelihood, I’d never be a regular classroom teacher again, I saved the music-related things (a good 10 boxes’ worth) but ditched the rest; it took a full Bagster dumpster to hold it all. Still-relevant resources were added to our donation pile, which took up half of our garage. When the day came to donate it to our school district’s annual second-hand sale, we wound up renting a U-Haul to hold everything.

There’s, like, an entire house’s worth in here!
 Steering this thing was not easy.

It’s hard to describe the almost manic drive I felt to complete this project. For six weeks, it was all but an obsession; every spare moment that could have been spent on other things (like, um, writing) was devoted to going through the house. It was a completely consuming task… but in the end? Fabulous!

Above kitchen desk – before

Above kitchen desk: after
Because I actually made space in the cupboards (by ditching non-sparky things) to store the gift bags and tissue paper and boxes of cards. OH YES I DID.

For the first time, every item in the house belongs there. Every room, every space, feels comfortable, joyful, clean. This isn’t (at all) to say that we no longer have stuff – we do – but the stuff we have is purposeful and meaningful. Plus now I have more time to write!

The one downside to this is that the house is so decluttered, when our awesome housecleaner comes, no one* notices.
NEVER THOUGHT I’D SAY THAT.

(*I notice. She is amazing.)

The mudroom project has hit a snag so we don’t know when/if it might be completed, but in the meantime, the house is a happy, cleaner place to be. My only regret is that my grandma never got to see it like this… But I’m confident that, somehow, she knows.