Nesting to the EXTREME.

I have never really "nested" before. I've heard people joke about it but by the end of pregnancy I've always been so tired that the last thing I wanted to do is random things around the house. I guess since I'm not working this time, it caught up to me. This is getting so out of control. I think Tom inwardly cringes every time he walks in the house, wondering what might have happened in his absence.

So far, I've taken everything out of our kitchen cabinets and pantry, went through everything, put things back. I have taken everything out of the furniture in our room. The dresser, chest of drawers, and armoire. All completely emptied, every item gone through and then put back what we kept. I took almost everything out of our closet and did the same thing. The hanging things I left but every one of them got inspected to see if it was still needed. Our poor upstairs....I ripped a big desk apart (it was falling apart on its own but needed to be removed) rearranged some of the furniture, hung pictures, organized the bookcase, and cleaned like a madwoman. I have to finish off our master bath and one spot under the stove and I think it will all be done. This has been a really strange couple of weeks, with a seriously primal drive to finish all this. Weird. I see now what people were talking about.

I didn't take before pics and I SO wish I had. Especially of the master closet....it was a disaster. For example, Tom didn't even have a laundry basket. Nor did he have adequate space to hang all his clothes so doing laundry was a guesstimate as to which piles on the floor were dirty and which just hadn't been hung up. My side was no better, I'm not trying to throw him under the bus. When there's no place for your things, it's hard to get started on putting them away. And, when clutter is everywhere, it seems pointless to pick up a few things if you don't have hours to deal with the whole big mess. But now, if something isn't in its spot, it sticks out and we know exactly where it should go. It feels so good for everything to have a spot (downstairs, anyway, upstairs is a work in progress) and to only have things that are actually useful. I'm sure there's more that can go but this was a great start.

I'm doing the one thing in, one thing out, for my clothes/shoes/bags. The absolute last thing we need is more stuff, so I'm being picky about what comes in the house. It was literally bursting at the seams with things and our house isn't too small. It should be far more space than what we need and to have it be crammed is absolutely ridiculous. The average house size in the US in 1970 was 1,400 sq feet and in 2009 it was 2,700 sq feet. WHAT?!?! And, our house is bigger even than that and we were still crammed in here. And, those are just US sized homes. Looking at the rest of the world would be even more shocking. I was so convicted that we weren't being good stewards of the resources we'd been given by having so much that we couldn't access the things we needed when we needed them, and by hoarding things we no longer needed or used. So the theme is downsizing. I want a home that's easy to keep clutter free, where we can quickly find what we're looking for, and that only houses things we enjoy and use. For example, I cleared out two full kitchen cabinets to put the boys crafty/messy toys, and we use them SO much more. Harris knows where they are and can go pull out what he wants when he wants to. Before they were scattered around and you couldn't see exactly what we had. I knew where things were but no one else did, certainly not a 4 year old.

Same with clothes. I think I've enjoyed my maternity clothes more because there was only a small selection of things. I could always see exactly what I had and I think I wore more variety, even with 1/8 of the selection, because I could see all the options. In a giant and full closet, I tend to wear the same things because I remember that they're there. I will definitely be clearing out more clothes but I need to wait until everything on my body goes back to normal. Assuming it WILL go back to normal. And don't expect the house to look much different if anyone comes over. The areas people see look pretty much the same, it's all the storage and things behind closed doors that look different. I think it's probably how the rest of the world already lives but its new for us. LOVE IT.

I let the boys "paint" in our master bath while I was on the closet rampage.

They could not have had more fun. I think they stayed in there two hours. It was not even that bad to clean up, considering how much they enjoyed it. Love, love, love those chubby little arms.



Here's Tom's sock drawer.

 I know, it doesn't really look like anything special. But before I almost couldn't put laundry away because things were bursting out of drawers and I had no idea where he kept his stuff. He had a bench on his side of the bed and everything just got piled there. And again, my stuff was every bit as bad, if not worse. It's so much more pleasant to do laundry now, knowing I'm not just adding the piles already stacked in our bedroom. 



There was such a difference walking into the bedroom where we stayed in Fredericksburg. It was just calm and peaceful to go in there. As opposed to what ours used to look like, like maybe it had been ransacked by burglars. Definitely not an oasis. Everything just feels more serene now and there's no rummaging around to find something random. I think I'll go light a candle in the calm and relaxing room and take a nap!


Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. 1 John 2:15-17