Only one day to go until I start three glorious weeks of holidays. 

Twenty-one days. 

Twenty-one nights. 

Twenty-one slow mornings, coffee in hand, ahhhhh… how’s the serenity? 

Though I want to do lots of schlubbing around in the coming weeks, I also have a few things I want to achieve in my holidays. 

The BIG project will be getting my weird storage spaces in order. 

I live in a strange little unit that’s connected to an equally ‘characterful’ place next door, and the rooms adjacent to the shared walls are storage spaces. Mine houses bookcases filled to the brim with books and DVDs, a stack of built in cupboards, also filled to capacity with books, old journals, CDs, cassettes and other random bits of this and that. At last count, there are three chairs jammed in there, as well as a monitor I borrowed from friends a few years back, old baskets, half burnt down candles and some art supplies. 

Then there’s a secondary chamber that houses a freestanding linen cupboard, my filing cabinet, an assortment of half-working IKEA lamps and lampshades, my grandparents’ super cool vintage table lamps, another shelving unit, a couple of buckets, a busted vacuum cleaner, a foot spa, one or two side tables, empty boxes, and an overflowing container of assorted wrapping paper. 

It’s basically the perfect country junk store, jammed between two rental units, deep in suburbia. 

This morning before I left for work, I got a big blue IKEA bag, filled with old text books and other random crap, and hoisted it into the recycling bin. It was SO satisfying! Yes, I’m recycling books. Whatever. They’re my books and I can (recycling) bin if I want to, bin if I want to, biiiiiiin if I want…. 

Fear not, I didn’t put the blue bag in the bin, those things are awesome. 

Over the next three weeks, I want to sort through every book I own, in preparation to re-shelve the keepers and ditch those that don’t make the cut. 

I want to go through all the CDs and DVDs and vamoose the ones I don’t want into a box headed for the op-shop. 

Then I’ll re-arrange the bookcases and maybe dismantle one entirely and donate it. I want to be able to SEE THE FLOOR, and have no fear of tripping over chair legs or vacuum hoses. 

The cherry on top will be emptying these sneaky built in cupboards. They are a trap for stuff I have zero use for. 

Oh look, a handy cupboard, I’ll just stack these books I haven’t read for 15 years in there and close the door. 

That’s what storage space is for, right? WRONG. 

Why do we fill cupboards, simply because they exist? ENOUGH! 

Newsflash: I am under no obligation to keep books that I have no future interest in, just because they’re books. 

I’ve read them. Time to release them into the wild, or the recycling bin. We’ll see. 

If I can complete this mammoth task, I’ll either be exhausted and spend the remainder of the holidays weakly marvelling at my suddenly gargantuan, well organised storage spaces, or I’ll be exhilarated enough to tackle the kitchen next.

Inexplicably, I still have enough mugs to handle smoko for several sunburnt roadworks crews, and once again, the containers cupboard is a complete mess! How does that happen? How? 

There are some ugly hand-me-down platters lurking in those cupboards. Time to go!  

I have too many utensils cluttering up my limited space; be gone damn whisk!

The cupboards under the sink need a ruthless cull. I’m just the woman for the job! 

Sounds relaxing doesn’t it? 

The thing is, nothing makes me happier than being at home. 

When my home is organised and tidy, my love for my poorly constructed, uninsulated roof, my second-hand furniture, my sunken bedroom, and the things that my grandmothers owned increases exponentially. 

Home is where my heart is, it doesn’t need to be where old junk is too. 

I deserve better than that, and I can change it. 

Maybe you can’t imagine anything worse than spending some of your summer on this kind of project. 

While I’m not chomping at the bit to get all sweaty and create a big mess before everything gets re-housed, what motivates me is the results. I know they’ll make me deeply happy. I’m sure an organised and tidy home lowers my blood pressure, and raises my mood. All that reaching into dark recesses of cupboards and sweeping and vacuuming and sorting and binning and donating is a bloody good workout too. 

That’s my summer holiday plan. 

I’ll go to the movies and have lunch with friends too. 

I’ll walk on my treadmill, make art, read books, spend time cooking, and gazing at trees and clouds. 

Twenty-one days is a long time, over 500 hours in fact. I plan to milk those hours for all the restorative goodness I can. 

Don’t fail me now IKEA totes! 

Annette x 

 

What are your summer plans? 

Got a storage space that needs some attention? Let me know, I’ll cheer you on. 

Do you have a foot spa lurking in a cupboard somewhere too???? #footspahoarders