The Morris' Go Minimalist

I've got to tell you all, I just dusted my house and it took a whopping 20 minutes. Now, those of you who've known me longer than 15 minutes know dusting is not my favorite thing to do. I would probably choose to do it absolutely last. After scrubbing toilets and changing dirty diapers. But now? Now it makes me positively giddy.

See, I stripped my house of all unnecessary clutter. All of it. Gone. Sold at the yard sale, dropped off at the Salvation Army or taken to the dump. I've been following a blog at http://unclutterer.com and one day he posted a simple plan for uncluttering your whole house. (I couldn't get the actual link to post, but you can find it in my left sidebar.) He recommended taking down everything but necessities and living with it a few days. If you need a little more for your home to feel cozy or decorated, add a couple things back, then live with that for a few days. This way you work into it slowly and maybe don't end up with as much as you started with.

So, I took everything down. I left lamps on tables. That's it. I took candles, knick knacks and photos off of bookcases. I rearranged my bookcases so they're all full of books with no nooks and crannies on the ends that would be calling out for stuff to fill them.

Then I took all the photos out of the frames. I sorted through the frames keeping only those I loved. I scanned all the photos, then decided which of those I dearly loved. And then, I looked over all the knick knacks. Which of them actually meant something to me (us) and which were just for show?

The chifarobe in the dining room was now empty because it used to be full of books. We've been planning to convert it to a curio cabinet, so it became the new home of the knick knacks worth keeping and that's all it is. The bookcases are for books and the curio cabinet is for curios! Funny, spell check didn't say anything about curios, maybe that's actually what it means.

Sadly, I didn't take any before pictures, but I've found this one which is an accurate representation of what every surface in my house used to look like. This beautiful cabinet had a lamp, a candle, a model sailboat from Kuwait and 3 photos.



And my kitchen hutch had roughly 30 items on its 5 shelves. There were 7 pictures, 4 bowls, 5 baskets, 2 vases, a pitcher, a pie plate, a recipe box, a wedding tray, a candle, some tiny souvenirs and more!


Here's the new and improved dry sink:


And here's the new hutch:


For me, dusting used to take all day. I took everything off whatever piece of furniture I was doing. I sprayed and wiped the furniture. I used a different cloth to wipe pictures and do-dads. Things that wouldn't come clean took a trip to the sink to be wiped with a damp cloth. Then I put everything back.

I still use two cloths, but it's so easy, I actually love to do it. I love to keep my beautiful furniture free of dog hair. I love to see that pretty wood shining. And most of all, I love that it only takes 20 minutes!