Feeling Free after Decluttering

I’ve been working hard on decluttering in the “storage room”.  It’s been one of the most difficult rooms in the house for me.  I’ve worked on it for a little bit every day for the past ten days or so and today is the first time that I felt like I was making a teeny tiny dent.

I took these two pictures and every time I get stuck, I take a look at them.  First, I look at the one with all the bags of stuff.  There’s some good stuff in those bags.  Some junk but some really nice stuff like brand new clothes with the tags still on them and shoes that have only been worn once or twice.  I’ve even gotten rid of some things that I was attached to by memories like a little book that one of the kids made in school.  When I start feeling bad about it, I look at these two pictures and decluttering becomes easier!

Here’s the before picture.  It’s the pile of stuff that’s ready to be donated.  Look at all the space it takes up.  It’s space that could be filled with family and friends instead of stuff that’s demanding my constant attention and all of my time.

Here’s the after picture.  It’s all gone!  I love looking at this picture.  It makes me want to work hard to make the whole house look like this – Clutter Free.  It’s so warm and inviting and it doesn’t fill my brain with chaos.

This room has been the hardest one because I’ve thrown so much stuff in there.  Whenever a holiday would come along, I would shove everything in there.  It wasn’t necessarily stuff that I wanted to store, it was just stuff that I wanted to hide.

I have kept a lot of the toys.  I think I know why I do that but it doesn’t really make sense.  When I was a little kid, we had a little attic room in our tiny apartment.  We rarely went in there, maybe once a year.  My mom put a lot of our toys in there so when we would pull everything out, we would find all this stuff that we had forgotten about.  I loved that feeling of seeing those things after so long.  It made me happy and I get the same feeling when going through buckets today.