yay dirt! i'm also decluttering in new ways. i hope to win someday :) especially in the density wars.
on "pulling stuff down". like cats, sometimes you can be devious and setup a harmless but educational scenario :> that'll teach'em that it's not good to do ;) it works with cats at least :)
He's already pulled stuff down on (or near) his head. He either ignored it or giggled, I can't remember which... I don't have the nerve to let him pull down something that would actually hurt!
Maybe put a cup of cold water atop a tempting placemat? :-)
Oh wow, good for you both! I'm very tempted to jump on this bandwagon right now, as decluttering and organization are long-standing goals/hurdles of mine. But I'm reluctantly going to rein myself in. Working six days a week plus preparing for square dance gigs puts me right on the edge of sanity, drat it. I'll enjoy reading about your endeavors!
Thanks! :-) Yeah, you've got some other pretty serious endeavors going on in your life -- I can't see decluttering as being as important to you as, say, preparing for vet school. It was never important to me, until now...
I can certainly imagine why it suddenly becomes more important when your little one might learn any day now how to open the sewing cabinet drawers! Of course, to balance that out, aren't you as busy as you've ever been in your life, right now? :)
Not sure about the daily systems thing on my end--getting home at 9 at the earliest many days means I pretty much go straight to bed, or if not I have no energy. So in my case it's going to have to be a weekly cleanup of the week's mess. Thinking about packing up books tho. That and dealing with clothing are on the top of my house list.
I found that the parts of the house tv kids have access to stays less cluttered than the places we shove stuff so the kids can't get it. Making a lot more available and flexible and useful storage has helped a lot. My big and tough project is finishing setting up my office and catching up on two years of back filing plus setting up art storage which is in the wrong parts of my office. I've decided to start with all the easy filing that I have files for already while keeping track of files I need to set up later. I figure that will at least ensure that I find all the 2007 tax stuff.
We've discovered the same thing, about the kid-accessible areas being fairly clean and decluttered. (Of course, it's clean because I hate seeing dust bunnies clinging to the baby's PJs as he crawls around in the morning.) The other parts of the house? Forget it! Those are the areas that actually need more in-depth work, but they're likely to be punted in favor of the dangerous toddler-accessible areas.
Ah! But you see, that's the secret. At some point, you have to toddler-clean more and more of the house as they want to walk and explore more. And then they want to be on the stepping stool to help you "cook", so the counter in clean. The house is clean because of the two year old, more more than the one year old. (Actually, the playroom floor is clean of dust bunnies and such because of the one year old that eats everything before you can stop him. The two year old just picks up things like that and hands them to us to throw away.) So, more kid-imposed tidying will be coming your way. One of those fringe benefits of having kids no one told us about.
Do the de-cluttering first. Otherwise, you may end up storing stuff that should've been punted.
Alternately, move from a house into a small apartment. Compressing your stuff does wonders for getting rid of lots of things. (When I moved from a two story, three bedroom, full basement house to a two bedroom apartment, I suspect I got rid of nearly half of the stuff in the house. Much of which was still in boxes and had not been opened for two moves.)
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on "pulling stuff down". like cats, sometimes you can be devious and setup a harmless but educational scenario :> that'll teach'em that it's not good to do ;) it works with cats at least :)
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Maybe put a cup of cold water atop a tempting placemat? :-)
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with cats, it's duct tape :>
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Not sure about the daily systems thing on my end--getting home at 9 at the earliest many days means I pretty much go straight to bed, or if not I have no energy. So in my case it's going to have to be a weekly cleanup of the week's mess. Thinking about packing up books tho. That and dealing with clothing are on the top of my house list.
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Alternately, move from a house into a small apartment. Compressing your stuff does wonders for getting rid of lots of things. (When I moved from a two story, three bedroom, full basement house to a two bedroom apartment, I suspect I got rid of nearly half of the stuff in the house. Much of which was still in boxes and had not been opened for two moves.)
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