*** Warning: Every so often, I feel the urge to write long, rambling posts about nothing in particular. This is one of those times, LOL ***
After months of procrastination, Hubs and I are going to tackle a few bothersome jobs this coming week. Every three weeks his roster is such that he has a Tuesday through to a Friday off, and the kids are in school during the day, so the perfect time to get some things done. One of the few benefits of a shift-working husband, LOL.
We've been here in this house for two years, and for that entire time, when the kids have outgrown clothing, or we've stopped using such-and-such household item, I've simply thrown it into a big ol' garbage bag (white ones, to differentiate between giveaway stuff and actual trash, LOL) and tossed it onto the heap in our fourth (spare) bedroom. Well, its gotten so that we can no longer safely get across the room. Think of Catherine Zeta-Jones' laser-beam gymnastics in Entrapment and you've pretty much got our junk room down pat. The landmines need to be negotiated and then removed before Boofah can move in (hopefully!) sometime in the next couple of months.
So that's one of the things we're doing - filling the car (and I mean FILLING the car) with white garbage bags and dropping them off at the Salvation Army thrift store. We'll probably need to make a second trip to take the full trash bags to the rubbish dump ourselves (for the record, if I've 'stored' bags filled with trash, it is never anything other than miscellaneous non-food/non-smelly/non-urgent things!).
Underneath the bags, there are boxes - ironically all labelled 'Misc' and filled with stuff that was never going to see the light of day even when we moved, but we kept a hold of because it was 'stuff'. Just doing the bags and then sorting through the boxes will take large chunks of those four days Hubs has off next week.
We also finally called our local council today about their hard rubbish removal service. A couple of times a year each household is entitled to have the council come and do a kerbside pickup equivalent to a 6'x4' trailer. Here's where it gets interesting, LOL.
When Hubs and I moved in together, we had very little by way of furniture, so we had to buy a few things. Because of finances at the time, we were only able to afford 'throwaway' furniture - even though some of it was new, it was always going to have a limited lifespan, and we've well and truly eclipsed that now. The futon we bought when Master J was born has been through two mattresses and no longer has any screws holding it together. For the last couple of months it has been hemorrhaging foam bits all over our loungeroom. It's going to the dump. We're also having a second smaller sofa picked up because the seats are worn so badly it can't be sat on for fear of falling though to China. Yes, we could re-strap the seats but the whole thing is filthy and ripped so off it goes to the great big garage sale in the sky. We also have an old wardrobe that came with us when we moved but has sat outside under our carport for the last two years because (thank gosh) we had built-ins at the new place. This was furniture Hubs had when HE was a teenager. We have the matching lovely faux woodgrain dresser as a TV stand in our main bedroom. Unfortunately, the dresser has life in it yet. But the wardrobe is going (in the time it has been outside, it has been rained on so many times it has become like a Tim Tam after it has been used for a Tim Tam Slam. Go on, click the link. It will make so much more sense then, LOL. In other words, easily destroyed by the application of pressure, LOL).
All this purging will only go part of the way toward the serious decluttering we need to do.
We have two living areas in our house. The first, the Family Room, is a large open plan 'square', with the kitchen, dining area, computer area and TV watching area each in their own 'corners'. Given that I spend 90% of my time either cooking or cleaning in the kitchen and that it overlooks the main kids' play areas, it gets a lot of use. The second is a seperate lounge/living room - its in this room that the futon and seatless sofa reside. It also holds the 'nice' TV and the 'nice' cabinet. However once the delapitated furniture goes, there'll be nothing to sit on, LOL.
The TV area in the family room has a leather couch and two armchairs. The dilemma: Do we move that suite into the loungeroom and set that room up as the sole TV room (nice TV, nice couch, closed off room) or do we basically 'gut' the loungeroom, leave the suite where it is (in the more frequently used living area) and turn the loungeroom into a temporary playroom/study?
Both options make sense for different reasons. I like the idea of having a TV room. At the moment we can watch TV in either the loungeroom or family room - this can be handy when the kids want to watch something and we want to watch something different, but in some ways having that option is bad all on its own - too much TV is a bad thing. The problem with having a TV in the family room is that it tends to encroach on other activities we use that room for - such as eating meals. Setting up the loungeroom as the main TV room would mean switching the lounge suite around which would then leave a gaping whole in the family room. The second TV would still be there (that cabinet is on its way out as well, but that's another story) but no couches on which to sit to watch it. We could even take it one step further and downside the cabinet, replacing it with a very simple Ikea-type thing. At the moment we have a massive wall-sized behemoth that we bought second hand ten years ago - vinyl covered black monstrosity I've been campaigning against for at least half that time. It has compartments for stereo, speakers, drawers etc...but they haven't housed any of that for years and years and so its basically an eyesore with peeling vinyl with an itty bitty TV taking up about a tenth of the available space. Removing it altogether would make it a very happy day for me, LOL. It would open up the living space dramatically, and I can imagine setting up a 'kids corner' with a little table and chairs, bookshelf etc. It's appropriate for that because the entire family room is tiled (good for spills). And this would mean we'd be a whole lot less likely to throw the TV on during dinner (we can see the set from the dining table) or in the mornings when the kids are getting ready for school.
Or, we can do the opposite, turning the loungeroom into the playroom/study (temporarily!). Pros: It's the only room, except for their bedrooms, we can totally close off (go for noise reduction). Cons: it has the good TV, not to mention our only DVD player. We can't move the cabinet or the nice TV out and we still like the idea of curling up in there to watch a movie because it has a lovely gas heater. But once the futon and sofa are gone, we'll have nowhere to sit! The solution would be to keep our eyes peeled for a simple sofa on sale. But we're not sure we want to spend the money. I kind of like the idea of having a whole room for TV but Hubs isn't keen - he likes to potter about the family room with the TV on as background noise, even when he's playing on the computer in the 'study corner'. It just seems pointless to have a nice TV and gorgeous cabinet set up in a room where we'd have nowhere to sit down to watch them. Switching the lounge suite to the other room makes more sense. Hubs' disagrees, LOL.
As you can plainly see, I have far too much time on my hands, LOL. Ideas, suggestions welcome!
Oh, and I've been really encouraged and inspired by Like Merchant Ships series on Living Well For Less. Some brilliant ideas there. We don't get a lot of garage (yard) sales around my parts and I don't have the transport to get to the ones a bit further afield, but I do have plans to do a round of the thrift stores next week. Very occasionally you see something half-decent so perhaps I'll be lucky enough to find something that will fix the dilemma, LOL.
I'm also on the lookout for new plates. We're past-due for a new dinner setting (90% of our dishes have chips in them) but I had the idea of first looking for odd plates of roughly the same size in thrift stores that conform to a particular colour scheme rather than ones that actually match exactly. I could go out and buy a $30 basic setting tomorrow, but where would be the fun in that? LOL.
Cheers,
Lizzie
After months of procrastination, Hubs and I are going to tackle a few bothersome jobs this coming week. Every three weeks his roster is such that he has a Tuesday through to a Friday off, and the kids are in school during the day, so the perfect time to get some things done. One of the few benefits of a shift-working husband, LOL.
We've been here in this house for two years, and for that entire time, when the kids have outgrown clothing, or we've stopped using such-and-such household item, I've simply thrown it into a big ol' garbage bag (white ones, to differentiate between giveaway stuff and actual trash, LOL) and tossed it onto the heap in our fourth (spare) bedroom. Well, its gotten so that we can no longer safely get across the room. Think of Catherine Zeta-Jones' laser-beam gymnastics in Entrapment and you've pretty much got our junk room down pat. The landmines need to be negotiated and then removed before Boofah can move in (hopefully!) sometime in the next couple of months.
So that's one of the things we're doing - filling the car (and I mean FILLING the car) with white garbage bags and dropping them off at the Salvation Army thrift store. We'll probably need to make a second trip to take the full trash bags to the rubbish dump ourselves (for the record, if I've 'stored' bags filled with trash, it is never anything other than miscellaneous non-food/non-smelly/non-urgent things!).
Underneath the bags, there are boxes - ironically all labelled 'Misc' and filled with stuff that was never going to see the light of day even when we moved, but we kept a hold of because it was 'stuff'. Just doing the bags and then sorting through the boxes will take large chunks of those four days Hubs has off next week.
We also finally called our local council today about their hard rubbish removal service. A couple of times a year each household is entitled to have the council come and do a kerbside pickup equivalent to a 6'x4' trailer. Here's where it gets interesting, LOL.
When Hubs and I moved in together, we had very little by way of furniture, so we had to buy a few things. Because of finances at the time, we were only able to afford 'throwaway' furniture - even though some of it was new, it was always going to have a limited lifespan, and we've well and truly eclipsed that now. The futon we bought when Master J was born has been through two mattresses and no longer has any screws holding it together. For the last couple of months it has been hemorrhaging foam bits all over our loungeroom. It's going to the dump. We're also having a second smaller sofa picked up because the seats are worn so badly it can't be sat on for fear of falling though to China. Yes, we could re-strap the seats but the whole thing is filthy and ripped so off it goes to the great big garage sale in the sky. We also have an old wardrobe that came with us when we moved but has sat outside under our carport for the last two years because (thank gosh) we had built-ins at the new place. This was furniture Hubs had when HE was a teenager. We have the matching lovely faux woodgrain dresser as a TV stand in our main bedroom. Unfortunately, the dresser has life in it yet. But the wardrobe is going (in the time it has been outside, it has been rained on so many times it has become like a Tim Tam after it has been used for a Tim Tam Slam. Go on, click the link. It will make so much more sense then, LOL. In other words, easily destroyed by the application of pressure, LOL).
All this purging will only go part of the way toward the serious decluttering we need to do.
We have two living areas in our house. The first, the Family Room, is a large open plan 'square', with the kitchen, dining area, computer area and TV watching area each in their own 'corners'. Given that I spend 90% of my time either cooking or cleaning in the kitchen and that it overlooks the main kids' play areas, it gets a lot of use. The second is a seperate lounge/living room - its in this room that the futon and seatless sofa reside. It also holds the 'nice' TV and the 'nice' cabinet. However once the delapitated furniture goes, there'll be nothing to sit on, LOL.
The TV area in the family room has a leather couch and two armchairs. The dilemma: Do we move that suite into the loungeroom and set that room up as the sole TV room (nice TV, nice couch, closed off room) or do we basically 'gut' the loungeroom, leave the suite where it is (in the more frequently used living area) and turn the loungeroom into a temporary playroom/study?
Both options make sense for different reasons. I like the idea of having a TV room. At the moment we can watch TV in either the loungeroom or family room - this can be handy when the kids want to watch something and we want to watch something different, but in some ways having that option is bad all on its own - too much TV is a bad thing. The problem with having a TV in the family room is that it tends to encroach on other activities we use that room for - such as eating meals. Setting up the loungeroom as the main TV room would mean switching the lounge suite around which would then leave a gaping whole in the family room. The second TV would still be there (that cabinet is on its way out as well, but that's another story) but no couches on which to sit to watch it. We could even take it one step further and downside the cabinet, replacing it with a very simple Ikea-type thing. At the moment we have a massive wall-sized behemoth that we bought second hand ten years ago - vinyl covered black monstrosity I've been campaigning against for at least half that time. It has compartments for stereo, speakers, drawers etc...but they haven't housed any of that for years and years and so its basically an eyesore with peeling vinyl with an itty bitty TV taking up about a tenth of the available space. Removing it altogether would make it a very happy day for me, LOL. It would open up the living space dramatically, and I can imagine setting up a 'kids corner' with a little table and chairs, bookshelf etc. It's appropriate for that because the entire family room is tiled (good for spills). And this would mean we'd be a whole lot less likely to throw the TV on during dinner (we can see the set from the dining table) or in the mornings when the kids are getting ready for school.
Or, we can do the opposite, turning the loungeroom into the playroom/study (temporarily!). Pros: It's the only room, except for their bedrooms, we can totally close off (go for noise reduction). Cons: it has the good TV, not to mention our only DVD player. We can't move the cabinet or the nice TV out and we still like the idea of curling up in there to watch a movie because it has a lovely gas heater. But once the futon and sofa are gone, we'll have nowhere to sit! The solution would be to keep our eyes peeled for a simple sofa on sale. But we're not sure we want to spend the money. I kind of like the idea of having a whole room for TV but Hubs isn't keen - he likes to potter about the family room with the TV on as background noise, even when he's playing on the computer in the 'study corner'. It just seems pointless to have a nice TV and gorgeous cabinet set up in a room where we'd have nowhere to sit down to watch them. Switching the lounge suite to the other room makes more sense. Hubs' disagrees, LOL.
As you can plainly see, I have far too much time on my hands, LOL. Ideas, suggestions welcome!
Oh, and I've been really encouraged and inspired by Like Merchant Ships series on Living Well For Less. Some brilliant ideas there. We don't get a lot of garage (yard) sales around my parts and I don't have the transport to get to the ones a bit further afield, but I do have plans to do a round of the thrift stores next week. Very occasionally you see something half-decent so perhaps I'll be lucky enough to find something that will fix the dilemma, LOL.
I'm also on the lookout for new plates. We're past-due for a new dinner setting (90% of our dishes have chips in them) but I had the idea of first looking for odd plates of roughly the same size in thrift stores that conform to a particular colour scheme rather than ones that actually match exactly. I could go out and buy a $30 basic setting tomorrow, but where would be the fun in that? LOL.
Cheers,
Lizzie
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