Beauty From Chaos

My husband is a pack rat. I used to be one.

However, living in a small apartment our whole married life has taught me what things are the most important.

I’ve learned that noted from high school, and pictures that people drew me 12 years ago aren’t that important.

Together my husband and I had two footlocker trunks, and about 3 different rubber maid totes full of “memories”. Each year since we have been married we have sat down and gone through every one of those memories. Each time we do we find the things aren’t as important as we thought they were.

It’s really hard to find places to store things in apartments, our apartment only has one closet and no other storage at all. That makes it hard to find places to keep things. As a general rule when we go through our things we say “have we thought about it or used it in the past 6 months?” if the answer is no, it goes bye bye. There are some things we do hold on to, it’s important to keep some things, but for the most part you find you don’t really need that toy from when you were in the 3rd grade.

Another way to cut the clutter is get rid of “pretties”. That’s a family name for knick- knacks. We used to have tons of little trinkets sitting around. I realized all they do is collect dust. For the most part now we have just pictures and a couple bottles (I love glass bottles, I used to collect them, at one point while moving I had 10 boxes of bottles. I’m down to half a box now).

Sure, some things are nice to look at, but a cluttered apartment makes it look smaller, and most apartments look small enough by themselves.

Cutting the clutter works for me!