My friend Brandi came up with a great way
to help declutter our lives in advance of the Advent season, so that we can
truly relax, enjoy, and prepare to welcome Christ once again. It’s way too easy
to let the time leading up to Christmas become over-full with advance Christmas
celebrations, shopping, preparing our homes, seeing all the people, and doing
all the fun/cute/Pinterest activities (no, just me?). While enjoying the season
in all of these ways is definitely not a bad thing, when they take over the
season and take away from the focus of preparing for Christ’s birth and truly
entering into Advent, it can be.
One way that Brandi decided she could
more easily enjoy Advent was by preparing her home for it. She decided to start
up a decluttering challenge in the days remaining before Advent and she invited
her friends on Instagram to join along. She made her profile temporarily public
while this challenge is going on so feel free to check out her stories
@branadyga to learn a bit more about the challenge.
At first, I wasn’t going to join in. She
started at the end of last week, and this week is my final week at work before
baby. I figured I would be too busy to focus on any decluttering. But as I
watched her stories and she emphasized how this isn’t some big, deep
decluttering project, but more of a “some is good” project, I decided to join
in.
The beauty of this challenge is that you
can really join in whenever and make it as big (or as small) as you want. You
devote as much time as you think you can to it, and there are no specific time
or volume rules. It’s really about coming together for a little bit of
accountability and fun seeing other people’s before and afters.
I started on November 23 with my side of
the bedroom. After that, I came up with a list of things that I could do with
my remaining days (minus this past Sunday), which I’ve shared below. I made
sure everything fit with my schedule, and only planned to do something on the
days where I wasn’t busy in the evening. I plan to share my progress on Instagram, so make sure you are following me @sweetspontaneity.
One item on my list, my office, is an
on-going process that I am approaching with a different mindset than I usually
approach decluttering. Usually, I’m a dive in and get it done kind of person. I
don’t leave the room and instead use a basket to collect anything that doesn’t
belong there. After I am done the space, I then go take the items to their
proper places. With my office, however, I was getting nowhere. I’ve had the
space very tidy and quite organized (for some standards, very organized!) but
it would continually get in bad shape again. The problem is, it’s kind of the
place where I put things that I have not assigned a specific home to yet. I have found that I would start sorting, make
piles, have someone coming over, and shove everything back into the room and
close the door. Only to start again a week or so later. A couple weeks ago, I
made the decision to start with one item at a time and to put that item in it’s
proper place before moving on. This often means that I am walking all over the
house, back and forth, while decluttering. No, this isn’t efficient, but it’s
helping me to make progress!
Do you have any decluttering projects
that you would like to get to before Advent begins?
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