Informal Resolutions

Writing this post has brought me some clarity on how I became a non-blogger (someone who has a blog but never writes anything for months or possibly years). Writing a post always takes a lot longer than it seems like it should and my life is filled with a lot of self-created distractions. I’ve started this post three or four times. One minute I”m browsing my instagram for old photos and then two hours later my butt is asleep and I’ve bought three new PDF quilt patterns, reorganized all of my Pinterest boards, read 7 posts on getting organized, and scrolled for 20 minutes on a stranger’s Facebook page because they made a crazy comment on a post that showed up in my feed and then I accidentally tagged myself in one of their photos.

Just opening my fabric closet almost always leads to a deep dive into the wormhole of forgotten fabric and projects which is a place where you can easily spend an entire day. That is one thing I’m working hard on this year – an informal resolution to have less stuff so I can keep my crafting things more organized and pleasant to spend time with and BE LESS DISTRACTED. I read a tip recently – one of those articles about “10 Habits of Super Tidy People Who Live in Magazine Houses and Never Have a Wig’s Worth of Hair Wrapped Around the Roller on Their Vacuums” – and one thing that jumped out at me was “tidy people don’t store things on the floor.” Well, hello! That’s my entire storage overflow philosophy. Pretty baskets and bins and XL buckets have been a staple in my life FOREVER. But it’s totally true that having all that stuff on the floor, no matter how organized it may seem, really just feels like a whole lot of clutter. And some of the buckets I’ve brought home are large enough for me to take a bath in. I’ll never get to the bottom of scrap bin that’s large enough for cows to eat their dinner from. Let’s be real.

We have been in our new old house for nearly three years now. I have moved every piece of furniture at least 10 times and had 45 different design ideas/schemes/master plans for each room. Decisions are hard. One decision that was very easy was tearing out the shag green carpet that used to cover the entire downstairs (see below, in pink, on some old floorplans of our house).

For a long time, this side of the room was the playroom (this is the space on the right side of the floorplan):

And the other side was where I had my office and sewing stuff – seen here on moving day after the avocado carpet met it’s maker (a big claw machine and dumpster courtesy of the city of Dallas – although a little bit ended up here as the comb and wattle of an Art Car chicken).

Then I switched everything around (at least 4 times) and for a while when I moved into the former play space nook, it looked like this:

(Look at all that stuff on the floor!!!!) Now it pretty much looks like this. For now.

I want a more soothing place to sew where everything has a spot and I can open a closet or drawer or cabinet and see and reach anything I need. Don’t we all want that?