Bring it on, 2010!

Holy cow. I am BEAT from today. Spent the whole hellishly hot afternoon (it was 102 degrees in my northern Virginian town today) lugging furniture around. My mom and brother helped. Here's what we got done:

• Lugged crappy old junk-magnet coffee table out of the living room
• Lugged the giant white pleather couch that was taking up the whole corner out of the living room
• Loaded both the couch and table into the back of my dad's truck to be donated
• Vacuumed the whole area behind where the couch was sitting - fallen drywall galore!
• FINALLY got mom to sort through her old records, donate some (1/2 a box), and take the rest (2 boxes) up to her bedroom
• Lugged the nicer coffee table from the porch INTO the living room - no drawers/compartments means no place to put junk!

I am so proud and so happy! We got so much done, it's ridiculous. My mac's battery's gone bad so it's tougher for me to use my isight camera to take pics of the progress (we don't have a digital camera) but I'll edit some in to this post tonight.

I really had to sit on my mom to get her to start with the records, but once she started sorting those, she got onto a whole de-cluttering jag and she - get this - SHE was the one who suggested we take the old furniture out! My family, which normally has the forward momentum of Mt. Fuji, actually got huge strides forward accomplished today.

The only bad thing about decluttering is how incredibly addictive it is. The more you do it, the more you WANT to do it. It's tough to be satisfied, even though I know the living room looks 300% better now than it did 6 hours ago, because all I can think about it how much better it will looks tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that...I am driven by a mental vision of my dream space.

Even my mom (the resident clutterer/hoarder/keeper/packrat/compulsive over-buyer) is happy with how things are going. I've finally got her on the clean-house bandwagon. The only hold-out is my older brother - he HATES change and insinuated today that I am a snake-oil salesman trying to trick the family into cleaning the house with my false promises that it will make their lives more enjoyable. No kidding. Sometimes I'm surprised we're genetically related.

We're getting close to seeing wall space now. My goal is to get the whole lower part of the house livable by the end of summer (August-ish) so that we can paint in fall when it's cool and not so insanely humid. The walls of the living room are currently a shade of cream-that's-gone-bad which my mom lovingly refers to as "funeral parlor yellow", and much of it is covered in my childhood crayon scribblings. Time for something new, clean, fresh, and pretty. Maybe a bright, Mediterranean tealish blue? I'll post some inspirational decorating pics as well. Many loves to all those decluttering out there! The journey is long (I know, earlier I was bent over a trash can outside fishing out change the vacuum cleaner picked up), but the pay-off (a smart, clean home) is so worth it!!