This morning I woke up earlier than the kids, which meant I had two hours of quiet. After the mandatory coffee and shower, in that order, I took some pictures of the main living areas with the new furniture placement by my designer friend, Kristen. The work isn’t done yet and the house is covered in construction related dust, so it’s filthy. But we’re getting close.

The Furniture Placement

Kristen put the furniture where she thought it should go for staging purposes for when we put the house on the market.

The top left picture is of the family room looking into the kitchen and breakfast room. The top right is looking from the kitchen into the family room. The big black unit is an entertainment center that holds the television. The middle picture is from another corner of the family room. The door to the left of the fireplace leads to the sunroom.

The bottom left picture is taken from the front door/foyer looking into the dining room. Through the french doors is the room formerly known as my office, but that now serves as a small TV room. The bottom right picture is taken from the family room looking into the dining room.

If you want, I’ll do more pictures (and bigger) once we start putting our stuff back in there – the stuff that we decide should go back in. For now, most of our belongings are hanging out in the sunroom until we decide we want and need a specific item, at which point we will bring it back in and put it away.

The house echoes when we walk through it, even with the furniture in there. Which I find oddly comforting. Because it means it isn’t jammed full of crap. At least not in those rooms.

A Before and After

This morning during my quiet time, I decluttered a basket that had been put in the sunroom. It had been in my office.

There was a lot of paper in there. Paper that went into the recycle bin or in a bag destined for a shredder. I also found three gift cards. Score! I hope they aren’t the kind that eventually dwindle to nothing, because I have no idea when they were purchased. One is $50 for a restaurant, one is $25 for Amazon and the last is $15 to Barnes & Noble. Scha-wing!

I will definitely be going through this again when I have all of my office stuff in one location, so it will get pared down more. But, for a first pass, I think I did a pretty good job. I don’t know about you, but I find it’s easier to decide I don’t need something when I see that I have four others.

Getting everything in one place has been one of the “rules” I’ve been following in my decluttering mission. It’s a pain to have to go through the whole house to locate every single pen or whatever the item of the day is, but it helps with the decision making process. It’s also depressing. Because, really? We have twelve unopened packages of fill-in-the-blank?

Back Update

Please accept my apologies for my lack of skill and effort in the Pic Collage department. I had the spinal injections yesterday and I’m suffering from the I-Don’t-Wannas while I recover. So, these are as good as they get today.

And I know I shouldn’t, but I really WANT to hire somebody to come in and clean my house from top to bottom when the construction is finished. But I won’t. But I want to. I really, really want to.