Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Small projects make a big difference

Today I wrapped up several small projects. First, I finally retrieved my CD out of my husband's retired laptop. His old laptop is the only CD drive left in the house and I accidentally left the CD in the computer when I played it a week ago.

Then I scanned the photo that my grandma mailed to me last week. I'm sending the hard copy to my mom but wanted a scanned version for my photo albums.


This is me at 13 months' of age. I actually rather like this photo!

Finally, I decluttered and rearranged the bookshelf in our dining room.

before


after


I decluttered KonMarie style. (Which reminds me that I really need to write up a blog post about the book itself...) I pulled every item off the shelf and asked myself, "does this bring me joy?" If so, I put it back. If not, out it went. Sort of. I now have a growing pile downstairs of stuff that needs to be physically removed from my house.

I'm happy with the results! The top shelf holds my sponsorship notebooks where I keep all of the letters from the children we sponsor, my library books, and review books that I am in the middle of reading and reviewing. The second shelf now holds our Bibles and a row of children's books. The first couple books are ones that we purchased for Cin-Ru. The rest are library books that I will be reading to better discern what we should actually buy.

The bottom shelf now holds some of Cin-Ru's toys that require a table to be used. We intentionally chose not to purchase a desk or table for her bedroom. This way, she'll be encouraged to spend time upstairs with the rest of the family instead of hiding out in her room. I thought it would be a good idea to move these types of toys upstairs so that she can pull something out and play at the dining room table with us instead of in her room without us. I still need to sort through the toys downstairs as I am sure there are more that I can bring upstairs. I'll leave the dolls and some of the books downstairs.

I'm happy with my progress today! Now off to study Chinese so that I can actually talk to my daughter once we meet her in Taiwan.

4 comments:

Julie Fukuda said...

I saw a video of that style of de-cluttering. My problem is not saying goodbye to items I no longer use but I just can't put perfectly good things in the trash.
Right now I am walking around the child seat I got to use when Ryden was visiting. The Salvation Army will not take it but it is just like new ... still has the tags. Too big for the regular trash anyway. Have to pay to dispose of it. Then there is the old broken computer... trash won't take it and electric store won't take it because it is too old (now you pay for disposal with the purchase price but it was bought before that system was in place. I can sympathize with whoever dumped the old TV on the street by our house, even though we are stuck with it.

Anonymous said...

We have been working on de-cluttering and purging. I find it very hard to toss out perfectly good things! I don't need that tin of push pins NOW, but I might need it SOMEDAY!

Carrie said...

All of our kids currently share a room. When we have enough girl, we'll give the girls their own room but for now, since everyone is very young, they share. This way the room is full of beds and not toys. We designed our house specifically with small bedrooms in mind and larger living areas. The bedrooms are tucked in a loft which looks down on the main living area. All of this with the desire to eliminate reasons for people to hang out in their bedrooms and to encourage everyone to hang out together.

Carrie said...

We specifically designed our house to have small bedrooms and large living spaces. The bedrooms are in the loft which overlooks the main living area. We wanted to make it so that rooms were for sleeping and not for secluding one's self.