February 14, 2025
I am still purging my way through the house. The front hall closet was done and I will have to say that I found a lot of stuff in it that went into the garbage or to be donated. I was ashamed of how much I had put in to that closet and ignored. It is now done and I am trying to keep it purged.
I also did the steps and the front door area. I had paint languishing in that area and I put it all away. I also put away mitts and a toque which I still need. I hung up my coats that hang on the stair posts. I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the stairs and floor. It was filthy as we use the front and garage doors all the time.
I have checked one of the little jobs off my to-do list. I put the matching door knobs onto the linen and pantry closet doors. I also fixed the broken ball catches on the top of the doors that have dummy door handles. All of the interior doors are done and I have 4 exterior doors to do which is another bullet on my to-do list. That is a warm weather job.
I was in need of a box to put items into for the thrift store. All my boxes are full so I decided to look at what I had stored in the maintenance room. I found a box that had items in it for the garage sale. I sorted through those items and put over 50% back into the box for the thrift store. The rest will go into another box for the garage sale. I now have a box to put more thrift store items into. A big win for me. Though I hate to go through the boxes in the maintenance room, I have decided to spend only 20-30 minutes a day working on it. It doesn't feel as overwhelming as trying to do it all at once.
Upstairs, I am ready to start purging the spare bedroom. This means dealing with the Christmas quilts and blankets in the closet. It will take me a bit of time as I decide on what I want to do with it all. I may have to sort through my Christmas tub and buy a bigger one to store what I have. It means letting go of some items. I know I will be struggling for a few days as I make decisions on what to let go of and what to keep.
February 9, 2025
I have decided not to put a date on when to sell my house and move into an apartment. It wasn't a hard decision to make as everyone is saying I need to make sure I have enough room for my sewing. The reality is a bit more than that.
As I looked around the house, there is more that I think about than just the sewing stuff. I have to think about a lot more than that.
Purging each room of any extra items I seem to have forgotten to get rid of. That was a theme last year.
Decide on what furniture I want to sell, donate, trash. I can't move a lot of my furniture into an apartment and I need to deal with that.
Do some upgrading in the house. I want new countertops in the bathroom and kitchen. I would like a new kitchen tap. There are other things I would like to do in the house.
Make some hard decisions on sewing, knitting, and crafting. I know where ever I move, I will need to downsize what I have. I need to work on that doing more than what I did last fall. I need to take off my rose coloured glasses and give up the "future me" or the "fantasy me". What do I want to do right now.
Clear out the shed and garage and keep only what I actually need. That is going to be a hard one as I am always thinking about "I may need that". I don't need a lot of it.
Enjoy my house for as long as I possibly can. Hire someone to clear the driveway when we have heavy snowfalls. I have the lawns looked after which is a life saver for me.
Moving is back to a future plan. As long as I can live here, I will live here. So onwards to having less to look after in this house.
February 7, 2026
I have started to think in a new way about how much is too much. My plans are changing as I am thinking about moving from living in my house and to living in an apartment. The size of the apartment is about the same as the upstairs of my house. My reason for moving is that I want less property responsibilities due to my age.
I am going to be doing a lot more purging over the next months as I make my decision. I won't move until fall as I need time to sell things, get a few things done to the house, and look for items I will need. I also need the time to purge more of my belongings. I do see that I store items I think I will need in the future. I can sort through them and discard what I don't need.
Will my place sell? Yes it will as there are no houses in our subdivision for sale at the moment. The last house sold in the fall and nothing has come onto the market since then. My biggest fear is it selling too fast and I will be moving faster than I had thought.
Anyways, I have a journey as I declutter, purge, and decide on my future. What ever happens, I will be living a minimal life.
February 5, 2026
The main living areas and bathroom is now painted and I am loving it. I am in the process of cleaning it once again. The kitchen is done except for degreasing the cupboard doors. I will work on it a bit at a time. I have to buy a door handle for the pantry and look for a picture for the wall by the back door. The major purchase will be a new counter top. I will buy a new updated tap for the sink and new handles for the cupboard doors and drawers. That comes second on my to do list.
I am ready to clean the bathroom and it has an to do list. I will be replacing the counter top, and updating taps, towel bars, hooks and cabinet handles in there. My goal is to buy the items over time and so some of the work myself and hire someone to do what I can't do. What I am taking out of that room will be taken to the thrift store. My first purchase will be a door handle for the linen closet which I can install. I will also look at new handles for the vanity. I can install those by myself.
As I look at the freshly painted areas, I am figuring out what I need to do. The spaces are calling for less in them. They are also calling for one colour throughout. Soft furnishings will be a navy blue and I will add a pop of colour here and there. I am still looking for fabrics I like to make items like place mats, potholders, etc. Will I have stripes, floral, gingham or a mix of them all. I am still thinking about that and will have to visit the two quilt shops to make a decision. The only given for what I make is that it will not have lace or ruffles. That is not me.
I am still decluttering as I clean the house. There isn't a lot left but I am working on areas that I tend to ignore. I have to take the curtain rods to the thrift store and put the curtains into the trash. I have hot spots that I need to focus on daily so it doesn't become a big mess.
February 1, 2026
I have the living room cleaned and almost ready for the painters. The curtains and rods are down and the holes filled for the first round. I will be ready for the painters on Tuesday.
I made a big decision to toss the curtains into the trash. They are about 15 years old and have had a lot of sun on them. The curtain rods will be taken to the thrift store asap. I am putting up blinds as soon as the painting is done. I will not be adding curtains to the windows as I am liking the clean minimal look the areas have.
I am really enjoying the plan I made for knitting down the yarn stash. It is keeping me focused on what I am going to knit for the first quarter of the year. With that in mind, I made a plan for the fabric stash. This year I was going to combine both using the stash and buying fabric. I have decided that I will buy a minimal amount of fabric this year and focus on the stash. I made some goals with only one goal not included. That is how much will I donate this year. It is a goal but I have not set an amount to donate or when it will happen. I have also set up what I will make until the end of March and will work on the 2nd quarter mid March. I am finding that this works well for me for both sewing and knitting. I would love to see a substantial decrease in both of these areas.
One of the areas I am working on at the moment is notebooks/journals. I have a lot of them around the house. Some are used occasionally and others remain empty. I want to get my number of notebooks down to 3 with a maximum of 4. Less would even be better. I am doing a course on the One Notebook System that starts tomorrow. I will evaluate the course and make my decisions based on what I learn. The given is to get rid of the notebooks/journals I will never use and have only those that I use on a daily basis.
I had a low spend month and am pleased to say that I bought very little extra. My biggest expense was food. I had to restock when we got home from Montevideo as I had very little in the fridge/freezer.
My biggest disappointment was gaining weight. Some of the food I bought in January wasn't healthy choices. I caught myself a few days ago and have since lost a bit of what I gained. I see the doctor on February 10 and hope to be back to where I was when I arrived home from Montevideo. I have set a goal to loose weight this year. My goal is to loose 20 lbs which is not what the dietitian likes but my joints feel the best when I hit this weight. I know that where I am at now is too much for my body.
January 30, 2026
January is almost gone and I have had a bit of a rough month. Getting back into the groove of winter was hard. Most of my time was spent with a shovel and resting after my work outs.
I am still cleaning the house and going through things in each room. I am almost done the living room and it will be done by Jan 31. I am in the area where I sit and knit. It is a mess with accumulated stuff. My job is to sort through it and get rid of what I don't need. When I can finish the living room I can move on to the next room. I am still working on keeping the kitchen, bathroom, and dining area clean either on a daily basis or every other day. It is working quite well.
I am still struggling with too much in certain areas of my life. I know my fabric stash is too big and I am trying to work through it. It is very overwhelming to tackle some days when I am tired and feeling slightly depressed. I ignore it and come back to it when I am in a better frame of mind. I need to think and put together a more detailed plan for the year. I have done well sewing in January though the yardage sewn has been small. But the projects I made used small amounts of fabric. I have a couple of clear goals for this year. I need to get some more goals set for the year so I can get more of my fabric sewn.
I did get my yarn inventoried and I am ashamed of how much I have. I have 93 balls of yarn, some of which are not full balls. When I look at the totals amount of weight (16.7 lbs) and yardage (12.86 miles), I knew I needed a plan to knit this down to a more reasonable amount in 2026. I came up with a several goals which includes only buying 1 ball of yarn to make a project. The rest of the year should be spent on knitting down what I have. With January almost over, I did finish knitting the socks I started in Uruguay and will have another pair finished tonight. I have knit 1 sock in a child's size and am ready to cast on the 2nd sock. Did I meet my goal for January? Yes and exceeded it by knitting one child's sock. I will be ready to start my goal for February.
I look at my garage and shudder at how much is stored in there. I know it will be gone in May after the big garage sale in our community. That also means a lot of stuff will be hauled out of the basement. When the garage sale is done, what is left goes to the thrift store. I am not having it hang out in the garage for another year.
January 23, 2026
I have been home for 3 weeks and I have been busy. My first job was to clean the thick ice off my driveway. That took me almost a week to do. I have since cleaned snow off my driveway and will be doing that again Monday.
I have been cleaning the inside of the house slowly and have done the kitchen and bathroom. I haven't got rid of anything but I have looked and know what will go next. I will replace a couple of things that are going with items I want. I am trying to get rid of the western themed items in the kitchen and replacing them with more neutral items.
I am in the process of cleaning the dining area and have the server to go through today. I am sure I will find things that need to be tossed and some items that need to be reorganized. It is part of living a more minimal lifestyle.
While we were in Uruguay, I bought enough yarn to knit 3 pair of socks. I was okay with that as I was supporting rural women keep their traditions alive and have a better life. Their yarn is beautiful and cheaper than what I pay for yarn dyed in Canada. I knew I had hit my limit of sock yarn. But what I didn't realize was that it was the top of my limit. How did I know that?
I watch a YouTuber who knits and crochets a lot. She decided to inventory her yarn and put up a spreadsheet for people with no cost attached. I downloaded it and started inventorying my sock yarn plus 2 balls of a heavier weight I got for Christmas. Here is the shocker. I have enough yarn to knit 8 pair of adult socks plus 2 pairs of infant socks. With the two balls I was gifted I have:
17 skeins of yarn
1220 grams or 43 ounces or 2.7 lbs of yarn
4825 yards or 2.7 miles of yarn
I was shocked at this amount and I have a lot more yarn to inventory. What did I learn?
The amount of yarn I have is a lot. The sock yarn I have is close to 9 months of knitting. I don't want to knit only socks this year so I am not allowed to buy any more sock yarn until late fall. I can then restock for only 4 pairs of socks.
I have 5 more tubs of yarn to inventory. I do know some of the yarn will be knit into scarves which I will donate to a charity. It is open to for others to use to knit for charity. Some of the yarn will be used to make doll clothes. I do not need to buy yarn for them for a while. Some expensive yarn I was gifted will be used to make items for family. I cannot buy much yarn in those weights this year. I will be on a yarn fast until I get the yarn I have knit down to next to nothing.
Inventorying my yarn has made me realize that I do not need to have a lot of inventory for sewing and crafting. I can buy it as I need it. I find that the less I have, the more creative I am.
I am working on having less not only in my upstairs but in my downstairs where I store fabric, yarn, and some crafting supplies.
January 1, 2026
I spent a lot of time in 2025 getting the house decluttered to a level that is below my clutter and stress thresholds. I want to now work on having my house feel calm and enjoyable to live in.
I have worked hard to bring calmness to my house. But it still needs tweaking in areas. Being away for 7 weeks gave me time away from the house and left me with a fresh outlook at my house and my life.
I have mulled over several things that have been on my mind even when on holidays. What do I want to do about certain things in the house. How will I accomplish it without breaking the bank? When will I do it? There are a few knowns and a few unknowns at this time.
Knowns:
The upstairs will be painted in early February. The painters will finish the areas I can't do. The whole house will be the light grey I chose back in 2019 when we had to have the basement done due to the flooding.
The blinds will be hung in the kitchen, dining, and living room.
Pictures will be hung.
Unknowns:
Will I have the kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanity painted.
When will I have the counters replaced in those areas and a back splash put up in the kitchen.
Will I hang curtains on the living and dining room windows. I like the idea of having black out curtains on the windows to help keep out the cold and heat.
Ideas I have in my mind:
I would love to make some placemats and other small items to use in the kitchen and dining area. I am thinking blue to start with. I have a couple of patterns I would like to use for the placemats and then make a couple of matching items for the kitchen. I don't want a lot as they have to be stored when I am not using them.
Changing the hardware on the kitchen and both bathroom vanities. Go for a sleek look that will be easy to clean.
Making a simple curtain to hang on the back door as it is mainly glass. I will need to see if I need to get another (or two) magnetic curtain rod to hold the curtain secure at the top and bottom. I do have grey blackout fabric I can use for until I find something I like.
At this time, I am still doing a lot of thinking while I clean both upstairs and the sewing room.
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