"Housekeeping Ain't No Joke"

"Housekeeping ain't no joke" - Hannah from Little Women.

My room is a mess! I can never think straight when my room is so disorganized. There are piles and piles of papers, unfinished projects multiplying like coat hangers and my father is constantly reminding me that my floor has a weight limit in regards to my rather robust book collection. A few times a year I have to have a full purge. The more things I have, the less productive I am. I've always been that way and somehow it still all piles up and collects.

It's no secret that most people acquire more stuff than we can actually enjoy. I know many book lovers who openly admit that they buy more books than they can possibly ever read. Recently, I've been trying to cut down on the books that I have that remain unread. I've put them together on the shelf and have been slowly chipping away at them. I've been much more discretionary on which books are really useful to me right now and been much more honest about how many books I really have room for.

Another big problem spot for me is the clutter caused by unfinished projects. For some reason I always have a long list of projects that I started but quickly lost interest in as time passed. For instance there were dresses I started that I thought I would just love to have but found as time passed, I just wasn't as interested in finishing  or wearing them. I'm still coming to terms with "scraping" projects. I make sure I save parts of the projects that are costly and that I am likely to use in the future and the rest is offered up for the taking.

I no longer feel very bad about this. The materials are normally perfect for someone else's current project and it frees me up for new endeavors. My productivity is still good. I attempt about 20 projects and finish 10. My sister is the exact opposite and works meticulously on one project all year. She makes pretty awesome things out of the pieces of my half-finished projects. I'm really lucky to know a lot of talented people who can make beautiful things out of scraps. I find that if I ever did want to come back to one of these projects, I probably would scrap them anyways as my skills, techniques and ideas would probably have improved. So it's win-win.   

Off to finish cleaning!