Clutter, Clutter, everywhere!

Good morning!

Well troops, I had the first of my new work schedule perks bestowed upon me this past weekend-- every other working week, I end up with a schedule that allows me Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. Off! THREE DAY WEEKEND, Y'ALL. I used to take having just scads of time to lie around and watch the clouds roll by for granted as a student and for three years as a high school teacher, with the three month summer vacation guaranteed. Lemme tell you, three days off all in a row, for the working girl I am today, is hard for me to wrap my brain around. You mean I don't have to go to work? At all? For three days? What do I even do?

While I *did* hit upon some pretty stellar finds at otherwise lackluster sales on Friday morning, you want to know what I did Saturday and Sunday? I cleaned. LORD, DID I CLEAN. I pulled things out of drawers, closets, cabinets, and boxes. Under beds, over armoires-- no piece of clutter was left undisturbed! I've been living in a state of "extreme house distress" for a couple weeks, since I vowed to excavate the closet in Bab's "man cave" to divest it of my party clothes and extra afghans and God-knows-what-all that accumulates in a closet with a door if you give a pack rat like myself half a chance, so it was time to take a stand against clutter.

Remember the beginning and end of Citizen Kane, where CFK has amassed an entire warehouse full of treasures from around the world? Imagine that in my attic, but with more Goji jester girls than Van Goghs...

Almost ten bags of kitsch-be-gone later to the local Goodwill (Nashvillians, the Eastland Goodwill is actually brimming with my cast off goods this month, take advantage of my estate sale gluttony and getcha some), I feel like I might actually just maybe be able to keep my house clean! Matthew was a lot of help ferrying the Glad bags to the drop site solo so I wouldn't try and fish out a record-I-don't-even-like or shoes-I-haven't-worn-in-years for old times' sake. I can't help myself. And yet! For someone who loves throwing parties as much as I do and having people over to the house, what a coup it will be to be able to call up a friend for dinner chez moi without having to cordon off portions of the house as embarrassingly unviewable. Finally, the sentiment of wanting a house that doesn't make me crazy and allow me to constantly misplace things in a tornado of clutter has trumped my attachment to said tornado. And I hope I can keep it up!!

Do you do that? Or are you good? It's nowhere near actual hoarding, but I feel like I do have a tendency, between my love of shopping, love of a deal and the general inexpensiveness of estate sale and thrift store shopping, to drag home WAY too much stuff sometimes. It's like my eyes are continually bigger than my belly, in terms of what I can actually proudly display. A two person house should not have thirty coffee cups (even if they're cute... let's pare down to just the cutest!) or fourteen lamps! I actually counted the other day, and there are fourteen lamps in use. Not even counting the ones in the attic, complete with shades, waiting for one of the others in the house to lose favor and be traded out for one of the benched lamps. Maddening! Not one cost more than $12...but even at the cut-rate, what is the "actual cost" of having to find places for and/or store all those extraneous lighting fixtures?

It's not Hoarders-bad, but it ain't Hoarders-good, either...

Are you a meticulously clean person? Or have you, too, felt the shame of having to haul a huge stack of books with no particular home into a back bedroom amongst unfolded laundry and an unmade bed to make at least PART of the house presentable? My mother and my grandmother were/are always SUPER bad about spring cleaning and purging their houses of unnecessary items. I love them, but rethinking household management of items was never a strength. If there was a shelf or a box or a cabinet to put it in, whatever spoon, wall hanging, fifteen year old dress was STAYING. The time frame for  onset of this behavior in my grandmother confuses me, as there's neither hide nor hair of the wackadoodle, adorable Heywood-Wakefield esque end tables I see in family photos, nor the fifties' console tv, nor any other atomic age trappings...yet any item that drifted into the house past the year 1975 is still in the house. Like a dinner guest that won't leave. Who knows? Maybe semi-hoarding was her midlife crisis.In my mom's case, the pack-rattin' was actually kind of a boon for high school age me, as despite a slight height differential, we were about the same size, and her entire bicentennial high school wardrobe was pretty much intact in cardboard boxes in the attic when I discovered them in seventh grade on an expedition into the attic for Christmas decorations. Dresses, skirt and blouse sets, and what seemed like endless patterned shirts were worn and worn and worn until eventually being decommissioned from sheer tattiness. Do you ever wonder if the deep crimson-with-with-sheer-black-overlay Homecoming outfit from the year 2000, so heinous to you now you practically have to use tongs to put it in the going-to-Goodwill pile, will someday set the pulses of future generations of vintageophiles racing? I hope not, but I reckon so.

This wasn't one of the dresses, but this is a lot like a lot of the dresses.

At any rate, let me pick your collective brains for a minute, and maybe you can help me to continue seeing the cleaning light!

What is your take on "spring cleaning"? How do you choose which items from an estate sale, however adorable and criminally inexpensive, come home with you? Do you have a particular method you use to keep your house less clutterlicious than mine, or is it something genetic I can't hope to improve upon naturally (creams? injections? Is there a miracle pill I can take)? Working around all these books, I've rustled up a stack of titles like Let Go of Clutter and Clutter Busting, and while I'd rather read a book about mummies or McCoy vases, I've vowed to settle down and try to learn something from people who do this professionally. Because again, how much better would my life be if I wasn't tied down by a dirty house and no time to clean it?

With all that in mind, I'll try to get you a picture of the (minimal! innocuous! completely inconsequential! but oh so fabulous) items I picked up at the sales last weekend soon.

Til next time!