Organized Simplicity: Step One

This post is continuing our series about Organized Simplicity.

Cleaning the master bedroom was a monumental task. Though we did the whole house three years ago, Mrs. True has gone through every other room and removed the excess at least once in the intervening time. Not the master bedroom. It became where stuff went to die, crammed in closets and corners and out of the way. Dealing with that took a solid 12 hours of work for two adults, with the "help" of the Truelets.

We took everything out of the room and placed it in the driveway. We then wiped the walls and floor of the entire room and began to sort through the pile that we made. When we started to sort it, we had extracted a pile of stuff from the room that measured 17'x5'x3' on average. Considering the room is 13'x10', and that it has a 2'x10' closet, we could spread the stuff out over the entire floor to a depth of 1.7 feet. Looking at the room beforehand I would not have guessed that. Mrs. True kept moaning, "So much stuff! How do we even have so much stuff?" as we carried out load after load.

Here is the stuff pile:

Here is the empty room (except for a cheese fridge in the closet):

We were asking ourselves continuously: "Is this beautiful/awesome or useful?" If we couldn't honestly answer yes we did not bring it back inside. Things that made the cut: about half the books, most of the clothes (we did pretty well on having a minimal wardrobe, if nothing else), suitcases and bags, a trunk of mementos each for Mrs. True and I, a small set of drawers with craft supplies, a bag of fabric and a sewing machine, basic furniture. Things that didn't: the other half of the books, a ton of craft supplies (Mrs. True explains that somehow some part of her brain keeps believing she's crafty when she's at the store, but never when she's at home), and random junk that had been pushed into this room for lack of anywhere else to keep it.

Here is the room after the clean up (yes, the hammock is our bed; there should be a post about that someday):

And here is the pile of stuff that we removed.

A rough estimate says we put back about 150 cubic feet of stuff. It would pack much smaller than that in a U-Haul, with proper boxes and all, but that works as the first number. Given that we estimated pulling about 255 cubic feet of stuff out, we did very well; we got rid of almost half! Well done us!

The room looks amazingly better (Mrs. True accidentally-on-purpose forgot to take "before" pictures because it was so bad) and we are very pleased. It also is much more motivating to keep such a lovely-looking space picked up. We hope to find the same results with the rest of the house.