I’m going to share a few photos of the garage as it is right now.

I’m at the point right now that almost everything in the garage is in a box or bin, and I’ve cleared several pathways.

I think that the angle I took the pictures from makes it look worse than it is, because there are a lot of clear spaces on the floor.

This area is actually one of the clearest parts of the room, because my husband’s scooter needs space to be parked and worked on if he needs to. There are two bikes and a bike trailer parked in front of the scooter.

This picture shows only the top of a few things, particularly the trash can, which is currently overflowing.

This final picture shoes the progress that I’ve made on the back wall. It’s probably the most organized space in the garage right now, but it’s not totally where it needs to be.

My husband and I had an interesting conversation last night about the best way to go about cleaning the garage. Since we may not have a free weekend for awhile, we have to do it in sections. Something I did the other night was to bring a few boxes into the living room and sort through each one, one at a time. I had several empty boxes to help sort things into categories, and I was also able to get a lot of trash and a box filled with paper that can be recycled.

I’ve had an idea that would really force me to get the garage completely cleaned out before the end of October, but I have to continue to work toward the goal little by little. It’s hard to say right now whether or not my plan will work, but I’m hopeful, and ultimately, I know that getting it cleared out and cleaned is going to have a huge positive impact on me either way.

There are parts of my house that are generally always clean and organized, while there are other areas that are “catch-all” areas, especially the garage. It seems strange that there was once a time, not too long ago, when our garage was at least 1/2 clean or empty, but now it’s around 75% full with most of the clutter from other areas in the house, especially things brought back out of the basement and the office.

The house is almost never in complete disarray, unless the kids aren’t made to clean up their messes, but I struggle greatly to form habits and stay with a project until it’s 100% finished. I might get something done, then leave it sitting instead of putting it away, which has a negative impact on my cleaning, because it ends up collecting things that shouldn’t be there, and ultimately, the cleaning has to be re-done at some point, because it’s gotten to be disorganized again. I struggle with asking for help and with accepting help, because I get overwhelmed enough when I’m on my own, but when there are others hanging around, asking questions, it actually gives me the beginnings of a panic attack, so in that sense, I understand the mind of the hoarders I see on the show. There are issues with being easily distracted, sure, but ultimately, I have a lot of trouble with other people touching “my stuff,” to a point where I start to feel upset and angry if I’m questioned, even if it’s something I don’t even want.

It’s depressing. But I know that there is hope, and I have thought that one of the things I really need to do is to clear everything out and organize “Clean Sweep” style, out in the yard. My biggest concern with that is having a time set up and sticking to the process to make sure everything gets cleaned up in case of bad weather. I would love to do this with my garage, because I’m confident that if I got started, I could get the whole thing done in about a day or two. The hope is that if I remove EVERYTHING from the space, I won’t want to put ANYTHING back unless I absolutely need to keep it. I know this doesn’t always happen with me, (see my office for proof), but the garage is a space for which I have specific uses in mind, none of which can happen in its present condition.

So I think tonight after dinner, I’m going to get a few things started, and make some progress. Perhaps before the weekend, I will have made a big enough difference in the state of this one troubled area to make me feel like I’m getting somewhere. But for now, I need to figure out what to make for dinner!

I started cleaning up rooms on Tuesday because our front room had become a toy room, so I needed to get it cleaned up. I had also been making a denim rug, which created a lot of mess from the straggling strands, so I had to vacuum thoroughly. I also had the kids help me clean the living room and get all their toys upstairs (We won’t go into the mess that is currently our actual playroom).

I’ve run the dishwasher twice this week instead of washing the dishes by hand, but I need to finish up the pots and pans today. I also need to finish cleaning the kitchen counters and floor. But I haven’t really gotten into the garage in a few days, which is okay, because I made great progress on the office yesterday.

The office has been a big mess for several months, with things just piling up and us not really taking care to deal with them. So I spent about 3 hours clearing up the piles that were all over the floor, sorting them into trash, recycling (paper) and stuff to decide on still. I filled a trash bag and two plastic bins. I cleaned up my crafting table and was finally able to use it properly to work on my rug, without stuff getting in the way and falling on me. There’s still quite a bit left to do in here, but the job is more manageable, because I can actually work on one section without the rest getting in my way.

I even vacuumed the stairs again, which I just did in June (I don’t do it often because it’s a pain in the rear), and scrubbed the floor in the upstairs hall to get rid of the remaining bits of wallpaper that were left in the corners. I wish I had a proper upright vacuum with a hose and attachments. I have a floor vacuum and I have one with a hose that doesn’t “suck” very well, so it’s sort of useless. We have a shop-vac, too, but it’s filled with car window glass at the moment and I haven’t gotten the chance to dump that properly and safely.

The remaining contents of the office are still sitting in my front room, but they aren’t strewn about the floor like they were in the office. I’m very glad I had my empty bins out in the garage, because they’re great for temporary storage and sorting things out to get them off the floor. It made my job go much faster yesterday.

I should mention that all of the above hardly took much of my time overall. I’ve still had time to read a couple of books, completely piece together and braid denim for my rug and sew most of that (it’s almost done!) and spend time with my kids, go to Bible study and watch Bob Ross’s PBS show a couple times. I’ve even stayed caught up on my Bible reading through the YouVersion app and their handy spoken NIV version, which I listened to while sewing. The kids even played in the pool one day, and I couldn’t really do anything but braid and keep an eye on them while they were in the pool.

To be honest, I’d really like to get back to a regular routine of getting to bed and sleeping by 11, and waking up and actually getting dressed before 8, but this week’s change of pace has helped me realize that it’s not always about *when* things get done, but the fact that you’re well rested and not overly pressed for time. I think a lot of people who have leisurely schedules still miss out on the fact that you can do things at your own pace, but you still do have to do them. Sometimes I feel panicky about not having things finished, but I usually find that I have plenty of time in the day to get it all done. Now I’m off to finish this rug!

Basically, I’m finding that without removing everything from the garage at once, it doesn’t look like I’m making a whole lot of progress. The first photo is actually AFTER I worked for the two hours, and it still looks like I haven’t done much of anything.

The second picture is something we had done awhile ago, but I have removed quite a bit of stuff from inside some of these boxes, and almost filled a large trash bag with fabric scraps that aren’t useful, among a few other things.

These boxes contain scrapbooking materials and more fabric. I have about 3 boxes of fabric, which I’ve gotten down from 3 boxes plus 2 or 3 bags. The scrapbooking materials fill a box and the open box on the printer contains several photo albums.

I intentionally made this picture a little blurry to protect personal information. The items in the box are all in need of shredding. The things on the floor are safe to recycle. The box is just over full, and I’ll be taking it to a shredding business as soon as I gather all the rest of the documents for shredding.

The final photo is of the box of files that I’ve sorted out. I have a ton of empty folders in this box, and the rest is things that need to be saved for one reason or another. I will try to scan many of these things, but I need to keep a paper copy of some things, especially things like our mortgage and titles.

I plan on sorting through the garage to get to the recycling this week, and we’ll try to get as much of that out as we can. This should make a difference in how things look in the next pictures.

Something else I’m hoping to do over the next week is to get things stacked up, instead of spread out across the floor. Again, this may make a huge difference in how the garage will look. I already have several empty boxes to gather random items into, and I think it will be easy to get things stacked up once I get the recycling out of the way.

I really do hope that I get a lot accomplished over the next week, as I hope to start working on the office starting on Friday as well.

I’m going to plan on giving myself a healthy breakfast and then get to work moving boxes and sorting things out. For my 15 minutes tomorrow, I’m going to work on trying to empty a few more boxes, so that I have places to put things that I’m getting rid of. Of course, this all means that today or tomorrow I have to finish cleaning up the whole living room so that I have an actual place to do this.

My ultimate desire in doing this is to have very little left over. I want to have my scrapbooking supplies, my yarn and some fabric, and a few small other things, but right now there is so much to sort through that I can’t really even think straight. It’s definitely a struggle to go through it all. I wouldn’t say that I feel the desire to keep everything, in fact, there is very little that I would absolutely not part with. It’s just that there is so much unwanted stuff to sort through that it’s hard to find the things I truly want or need to keep. One of the things I have out there is a box filled with papers that need to be shredded. If I find it and can fill it the rest of the way, I may even be able to take it away to have it shredded and not even have to worry about doing it myself. That would be a relief. There is also a lot of recycling that needs to be taken, and I’ve even started throwing things in the trash instead of recycling because it gets to be too much. If the garage were clean, I know this would be a much easier process.

So that’s part of my plan for the weekend. I know, it sounds exciting, but sometimes you just have to get somewhere!

My front room has stayed fairly clean in spite of the flow of traffic, though I need to do a nice cleaning tonight as best I can. We got boxes from the online school our daughter will be doing next year, so those are sitting in a corner of the room, and the recording equipment for the podcast my husband helps on is also in there temporarily. The rest of the floor is clear, but the mail has piled up a little. Overall, it’s still not overly messy, and we try our best to keep the loveseat free of stuff since we’ve been using the room more frequently.

On the dish-washing front, I have to say that I’ve been neglecting it a little, only washing dishes every few days unless absolutely necessary, and yesterday it was necessary! We had run out of silverware. I’m glad I got rid of all but 8 of each, because it forces me to wash dishes more frequently whether I want to or not. My current struggle with this is that it’s been hot and our air conditioning was broken, which makes me completely unmotivated to do anything but sit in front of a fan. But it cooled down last night, and I was able to wash about half the dishes. Tonight, I washed the rest (plus today’s) in less than 20 minutes, and I have to say how much I had to push myself to get started. Once I started it was easy to finish everything, but really, the biggest problem I have with this habit is getting started. I’m sure it’s not going to be the last one I have this issue with, so the fact that I’m really trying to push myself through the lack of desire is a good thing, and I hope it continues.

I should have been starting a new habit this Friday, but obviously I’m behind on getting started with my most recent one. I’ll probably add just one extra week to this, and I’ll start the new habit next Friday instead. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll probably put the office next on my list, because not only does it need help, it’s going to be my daughter’s school room as well, so we need to be sure to have a clean place to work on her school. It has gotten a little better than it used to be, but there is still a lot of unnecessary paper in the room, and I need to get the files back to an orderly state.

I’m also setting a goal to blog at least twice a week on here, and even get back into posting my own photos. I’ll share what I can of the garage as I’m working on it, and include office photos as well when that time comes.

My dad has always had a woodshop, ever since I can remember and before, and when they moved about 4 years ago, he brought his old tools and equipment to the new house and put them into the shed or garage, which was, at the time, falling down and completely without a floor. In just the last few months, the transformation has moved more quickly because they’ve finished a nice little garden shed for my mom’s gardening and yard tools, and have decluttered a lot of the other things that were hanging out in the garage so they could finally turn it into a proper woodworking shop.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, because there are a lot of them, and there is a before and after section.

Here are the pictures before the work started. My parents had already done quite a bit of work on their yard and you can see my mom’s shed in the background.

They had to prop up the sides as it was leaning quite a bit to one side.

This is probably the oldest outside picture, as it shows no work has been done yet to the other parts of the yard.

In the middle of the leveling process. The garage was also full of storage items at the time they were fixing the lean.

Here’s the finished product. Lovely, no?

Most of the work benches are things my dad has owned for over 30 years or received from his dad’s workshop in the late 80′s. And notice that the floor is newly poured as well. My parents did all the concrete work themselves. Behind that door is a very tiny office with an older computer for design work. Don’t worry, the shop is quite secure.

This large bench is a new production. Almost anything made out of wood in this shop was made with this equipment by my dad himself. There is a lot more to see, but I didn’t want to have too many pictures.

My dad made all of this. The tools and the chest. (Can you tell I’m proud of that?)

Anyway, I thought this project would be cool to share for a couple reasons.

1. You can do ANYTHING if you have a plan and set your mind to doing it.

2. You don’t have to be young to do big projects. My parents are in their 50s, and this project was done entirely by them with very little extra help from others.

3. Don’t get discouraged if your project isn’t finished in a weekend. Like I said, this took close to 4 years to complete. Did they give up? No, they kept working at it.

4. My parents are awesome.

Anyway, I’m going to start a new habit on MONDAY this coming week, and it’s probably going to help me blog more. I’m going to start cleaning out the garage again, working for 15-30 minutes a day, and I’m going to start sharing a little bit of what is going out of our house as we remove things from the garage. My in-laws are currently staying with us, and will be here a few more days, so it might be a little hit or miss the first week of this habit.

My dishwashing habit took a hit after our mini-vacation, and I didn’t get dishes washed for a few days. I did get back to it, and I’ve been faithfully washing dishes about once a day for the last 4 days again. My front room is as clean as it can be with 2 extra people leaving things around, because the things left sitting aren’t things I can properly put away, so I just try to arrange them neatly.

I really want my garage to be completely empty in the next 6 weeks or so, but the only way I can truly get this done is that I’m going to have to start putting things right into the trunk of our van to go where they need to go. I obviously can’t do that every day, or during the day if my husband is at work, so I’m just going to start with some sorting of things I want to keep, and getting those things organized back into their proper place.

The final product of a garage that I want to see is very shocking in comparison to what is currently in there. I know I’m missing some things when I think about it, but there are very few things I want left behind. Here’s the list as I can remember right now:

• Tools and home repair items
• Bikes
• Knitting and Sewing boxes
• Luggage

I’m not sure if there are people just like me who don’t really have regular habits for getting chores done, but I’ve definitely seen a difference, even just a small one in this short time, in how the house feels. I feel like there’s a sense of calm because I don’t see a ton of stuff all over the floor, and my counters aren’t covered in dirty dishes that take forever to wash. I can do other less important chores without feeling guilty about the major ones, and I’ve noticed that there’s a sort of “spreading” happening just by getting two simple tasks done once a day. It seems like we’re more relaxed with the house cleaner, and even the kids have started pitching in.

My next habit is going to start next Friday, the 8th, and I’m probably going to start cleaning out the garage for about 15 minutes per day. We have a lot of things to take to various places, so I’m hoping to get a lot of that done in July, and this will make the task of clearing out the rest of the stuff that we haven’t sorted yet much easier. We haven’t taken much out of the garage, we’re still putting a lot of things in there, but my ultimate goal is for it to have nothing in it but tools and other related items. I will be going through a lot of the things that we store in there and eliminating as much as I can, especially things that I’m not going to be able to use in the next 6 months. If I get through the garage in a good amount of time, I’ll move on to decluttering the other spaces that I haven’t finished. Specifically, the basement and the shed in the backyard.

My dream for the basement is that it will be completely empty except for essentials, and my dream for the shed is that 1. we would clean out all the mold and mildew that has built up on it, and 2. that it would house only garden tools and the wood pile. There are a lot of things in there right now that have really cluttered it up, mostly broken yard toys. So we will have to get that done before winter, obviously, as we aren’t going to need any of those things once we move.

My next habit after the garage will start on July 29th, and I haven’t totally decided what that will be yet. It is likely to have something to do with our home office, which is still really drowning under a sea of paper clutter. When I start working on the office, my first task is going to be getting the bills and other important papers under control, and after that, I’ll be digitizing very important papers for about 15-30 minutes each day. I’m also going to go through each section of the office and get rid of the excessive things that we have that we don’t need anymore.

If I start a different habit, it will be keeping my bedroom clean and keeping the clothes put away. This could start in August if I do the office habit first.

I’m not sure what I’m going to start working on in the Fall. We’re going to have our daughter in an online school, which means that I’m going to have to spend many hours a day working on school with her, and I will have to work on having a daily schedule that works with this school schedule as well. I’m not good at having a regular schedule, so this will probably be one of my personal habits beginning sometime in August as well, because we’ll need to start practicing for the school year.

Besides this, the Fall is also going to bring a lot more preparation and focus toward our move, so even though I’ll still be working on habits, I’m going to have a lot of things going on that aren’t going to be permanent habits. We’ll probably be doing a lot of work on our house to get it ready for renting.

I’m glad and excited that my habits are sticking so far, and I’m hopeful that I can continue adding a new habit every 3 weeks without compromising the ones I’m already working on. Change is coming, slowly, but it’s making our home more comfortable and relaxed, and that’s worth a lot. And I am planning on visiting here a little more frequently!

One of my hopes in keeping this particular room clean was that the piano would not continue to be a catchall. I also had hoped that our mail would not overtake the cabinet by the door, but some days, it did. I try to weed it out frequently, so that things that aren’t useful don’t end up clogging the area or in a pile somewhere else. Some mail never made it through the front door, which was a pretty big change for us, as we tend to bring in even the junk when it’s just a few extra steps to toss it in our big can outside. The mail is still a work in progress, but habits don’t always form easily. We continue to practice and as we do, it will improve.

My next habit is going to be washing the dishes once a day. This is really a huge thing for me, because my husband and I both loath washing the dishes. We have struggled with keeping our dishes clean for 10 years, but now that I’ve cut down our kitchen to a manageable collection, it has gotten a little easier to do them, not to mention, more important. When you only have 8 spoons, you run out quickly! We did solve this issue by cheating a little, as I bought a little box of plastic spoons to use in a pinch. But now my goal is to form a habit of washing the dishes every night so that this is no longer an issue! I don’t plan on using the dishwasher for this, because we don’t really need to anymore. The only time I think we’ll have to use the dishwasher is when we have guests, which hasn’t happened much lately. We also plan on going to back to paper and plastic if we have parties, because trying to have all reusable dishes for parties was overwhelming for me since I haven’t been in the habit of washing the dishes each night.

My “first” habit of cleaning the front room ended up being a couple of little habits. This was kind of interesting to me, because I didn’t really think about how one habit can lead to another in a very organic manner. I think washing the dishes is going to lead me to habits like keeping our kitchen table and counters clear, keeping the floors cleaned up, and keeping trash and recycling in check. I don’t know how it will truly turn out, but stay tuned if you’re interested.

I’m not quite sure yet what my next household habit is going to be, but I’m leaning toward decluttering the garage. I’m thinking that 15 minutes a day will do it a lot of good, and it’s also something I can work on sporadically over the next three weeks, in preparation for making a habit of it. What I’ll do when the whole place is cleaned out, I don’t know! I’m guessing that’s going to take longer than I really want to admit.

Did you work on a habit over the last few weeks? I’ve been talking to my husband about it, and it seems that he’s beginning to work on a habit or two of his own! I’m excited about this because we’ve both been in the habit of not having good habits. It’s just one day at a time, one step at a time, and before long, you don’t even notice you’re in a habit!