Apartment Therapy 8 Step Home Cure

We are in week one of the Apartment Therapy 8 Step Home Cure. They are on week 4 on the website. It's like Flylady but it's not Flylady.

What drew me to the exercise was The Outbox concept of culling items from your home. You set up an Outbox, in our case the living room is serving as The Outbox. You place items there while you are going through things. The items stay in The Outbox until they are moved back to a new home or thrown away or recycled, thrifted, sold, etc. For me it's making parting with items a little less traumatic.

I get so attached to things, things that I really don't use or need. In the meantime you see your house getting all decluttered and looking spiff and you are less likely to want to clutter it all up with the stuff in The Outbox. Of course you can check out the book for Maxwell's much better explanation. Would this work for everyone? Probably not, but what does?

I'd post pictures but the house is in the looking worse before looking better stage.

I do feel like I'm accomplishing something. I'm getting like things together. All of the candles and candle paraphernalia are in our bedroom, waiting a good go through. I went through my clothing armoire so there is room for the candles to all live together there. All of my Star Wars toys are now in my office waiting organization. I have a huge pile of plastic bags and totes full of clothes waiting to be sorted in the basement. I have all of the board/cards games in the dining room hutch. All of E's craft stuff is together in the hutch. The glass/china that was in the hutch is waiting to be boxed up for now.

While it makes sense to have like things together and not strewn across the house stuff tends to wander and migrate. So I suppose I'm doing a reverse migration of the stuff.

While I'm getting like stuff together I'm finding things I forgot I had. Like a beautiful set of crystal candlestick holders we used for the tapers for our Unity candle when Dave and I got married. I probably won't display the whole set with the actual Unity candle but the candlesticks and some tapers will look very nice somewhere in the house after the great cull of stuff is done.

The big project is the backyard. I'm really not an outdoorsy kind of gal. I'd rather stay inside and read or knit. But the kids love being outside. Our goal is to spiff up the backyard so that it is hospitable and safe for the kids. We have a few ideas for a trellised surround for the air conditioner, basement window wells and furnace exhaust, something that will allow air flow and not allow little fingers access. Dave wants a bocce court, we might go smaller then the usual 10x70 foot size. We are considering a play structure of some sort for the kids. We have a grill, table, chairs, umbrella, small plastic slide/climbing thing, a Cozy Coupe, sandbox on raised platform, a little table and bench Dave made, and some random outside toys. I'd also like to plant some flowers in the backyard.

The first step is having a planning meeting with Dave to make a wish list and a more realistic list of what we want to accomplish in the next few weeks.