Making a Goal.

I haven't read Week 3 yet - I still feel like I'm in week 2 until Friday to be perfectly honest as I let the new 'vision of the future' bed down in my sub-conscious and I let it simmer into my life.

But to be truthful - I'm itching to do something about some of the vision - and working on the 'House into a home' part of the vision is probably the easiest to split up into goals and will take a long time to do. But here's the good thing - it's something that will make a big impact as soon as I achieve a small goal.

This week and in some previous weeks I've been checking out IKEA catalogs, and looking at blogs to see how other people down-sized their places and got them organised so that they were homes.

I've ended up with 2 blogs that I keep coming back to -

A Slob comes Clean  and
I'm an Organizing Junkie and
IKEA Family Live

When I see some of the spaces that people live in, in the last link - I consider my small flat HUGE in comparison, and feel blessed. Still have no idea how I'm going to fit a piano and 13 bookcases into it. But still. I can find my way through.

TASK 1: Organising my Linen

So setting a task - picked an easy one to start with - Organising my Linen. I have one large shelf to do this with. 2 IKEA clothing boxes, a bag that one of the Doona's came in and that's it.

I've labelled one box "Heirloom Linen" and put all my beautiful embroidered linen that I love to take out and use for special occasions and that I've inherited. The sentimental value of the linen far outweighs the usage of them. There's linen there from my grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother from one or both sides of the family. I hope to leave it to my neices and nephews when I go.

The other box is labelled "Winter Linen" but more reasonably it's the Off-season Linen. Downsizing my winter doona covers to 2 was a bright idea, especially when I did it during a period of financial abundance and got 2 beautiful quilted and patchworked Doona covers that are heavy enough to make a summer doona warm enough for winter too.

I came up with an innovation too - I've put my winter nighties in with the doona cover sets. Freeing up space in my chest of drawers. Yay!

The Bag isn't labelled... yet. But it has all the bits and pieces for my sofa bed. It's a single bed - so it has it's own doona, pillow, and linen set. Only 1 this time. It all fits in the bag, so that makes it easy. And the bag fits on top of the heirloom linen box, and that frees up a stack of space in my linen shelf.

So Summer Linen - I have 4 sets there - but summer linen takes up so less space and ever since I saw a spot on Better Homes and Gardens about putting all the linen of a set into a pillow case and storing that  together, I've been doing that too.

Just have to work out  how to deal with the towels, washers, teatowels and other bits and pieces. It needs to be open because what I don't see, I don't use. But I need some way of keeping the sheets and towels separate. Will think about this. What would Nony (the Slob) do? Oh yeah - she has a whole closet with a shelf just for towels. Hmmm.

I WILL add pictures to this as I finish the project. Back to adding the linen back in.

Edited to add at 11pm: 

I spent most of the day until I had to work doing this.  I am looking at 5 garbage bags full of clothing and bits and pieces that I know I will never miss in a pile ready to be taken away tomorrow for donation.

I cleaned the wardrobe, the dresser, the bed boxes, moved some things around. Created a clutterbox. Clutterbox is an innovation of mine too - it's the 'I have no clue where these go so I'll put them here and then work it out later' box. It's got mostly BJD things in it at the moment. I have to find somewhere to put them where destructo-cat won't get to them.
Now THAT was a satisfying activity!

And I promised you some pictures...

This is actually wonderful to me - The boxes in the corner are the single bed set, and the heirloom linen. The ones in the middle are my summer doonas and sheets. The box that is missing is the matching one from the other side and it has accent pillows and a throw rug from the summer sets.

You can see how full the wardrobe hanging space is. It isn't now!