Friday, November 6, 2009

Changing my Space

Today has been a day filled with impatience. I awoke early with lots of ideas for how to begin clearing out the space that will become Alan's room and bathroom, and decided to tackle the bathroom. Before 10am, I had cleared out the medicine cabinet, the under sink cabinet, and the linen closet. What I had was a whole lot of stuff that needed a new home, and not a lot of clear ideas on where it would go.

I spent some time measuring, and determined that I would probably do best to get a new cabinet of some kind for my bathroom. For so long I've had an old night table in there, one that was painted kelly green, and had been gifted to me. It was fine for holding towels, and also had a little drawer. But it wasn't going to be enough to hold all my first aid, toiletries, and towels. In addition, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to make the most of the little nook behind the bedroom door. I figured that I could add three shelves there and turn it into a second closet of sorts. What will live there? I have some ideas. Extra linens, for sure, and blankets. The overflow of towels. The plethora of bags that I've managed to acquire - some girls love shoes, for me it's bags! Who knows what extra stuff will end up in there, too, but it will be a good use of space, especially now that I need to be more mindful!

One of the added bonuses of going through this process of reorganizing my space is purging. Getting rid of what I don't need or want. Part of what is tricky here is figuring out what to do with some things that can't go to Goodwill. What do I do with an old electric toothbrush that is in perfect shape? Or shoe polish? Or the odd pieces and parts of things that I still have and use - with the exception of those odd pieces and parts. I have a hard time just deciding to toss things in the garbage. I know that those things will end up in a landfill, and will become just one more thing in the huge heaps and piles of garbage that are mounting in epic proportion on this planet. And as much as I don't want to hold on to useless crap, I really don't like the idea of throwing away things that someone somewhere might have a use for. I guess there's always Freecycle...

So, today I rendered my green bathroom livable in a new way, and cleared out the pink bathroom. There's more to do. Tomorrow, I will hopefully be able to install these shelves, and begin to optimize that space. Then, it will be time to tackle the closet in the music studio/healing room. I have an idea to move the cedar chest into the closet, making some more floor space available. That will necessitate me getting rid of a file cabinet and a bookshelf that holds a lot of music. It seems reasonable to build some shelves into that closet, too. Potentially two. I'm thinking it would be great to have one shelf that would hold all the music, and another that would hold some office stuff, like my printer/fax machine. Oh, the great blessing it would be to have all of that accessible but out of sight. I'm going to work on that this week, for sure.

What I am already seeing is more space in spite of the fact that I am moving stuff into less space. The top of both of my closets is pretty spacious right now. I even have some floor space in my bedroom closet. The basement is even more cleared out after I finally got rid of all the recycling. And surely, there will be some stuff that will end up down there in totes, if not on the landing. I finally got all my camping/trekking gear together into a single tote, for example! It's been all over the place for ages, and now it's all together. I love it!

One day at a time. Little by little.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Urpi

Urpi
Inside a hostel in Cusco, Peru