Decluttering Corners, One

I have a bit of a confession to make: I am addicted to HGTV and their prime time home renovation and house-hunting shows. However, as much as I enjoy the content I usually can't stand the people - often younger than me and horrendously picky and stuck-up in their idea of what makes a livable house. Whenever we get the chance to actually buy a home, I promise I won't be that picky. 

Anyway, watch these shows enough and you find certain buzzwords common throughout, things like "modern kitchen" and "open concept."

Now, our current house is what I would definitely term "open concept." The kitchen looks right into the eating area and living room. Convenient for watching the kids while making dinner and never being far from the action, but absolutely killer when it comes to visual clutter. Everything is seen all the time from everywhere. I'm finding more and more that even though I keep a reasonably neat and mostly organized house, I am getting really tired of looking at all our stuff, all the time. 

So I have begun a crusade to reduce visual clutter wherever I can. I started today with the side of our fridge. It occurred to me way after the fact that I might make a theme/blog series/challenge to myself out of this, and to that end I would have been better off with a Before picture, but oh well. 

Previously this side of the fridge was sort of my vertical office. Every important (and unimportant) business card or post-it with phone number, take out menus (which we never use), school info, multiple calendars, etc, was ALL clipped here somewhere. Most of it overlapping. It was one of those spaces that you just sort of accept because you are so used to looking at it. But today I took it on. 

I copied over all the relevant phone numbers and contact info onto one sheet, written neatly with different colored pens, in hopes that any adult in my house who needed the information <cough, Don> would find it easily. I threw out all the little bits of paper, rubber-banded the business cards and stuck them in the junk drawer (which will be my next project), and whittled down the remaining info to what was truly most important to have quick and easy access to. All that remains is phone list, grocery white-board (which only says Lucky Charms at the moment, oops), upcoming appointments, year-at-a-glance calendar, and school calendar/information. Trust me, it looks a million times better than it did. 

There is more work to do, just on the fridge alone - case in point, jumbo onions, candle, and confiscated toys all collecting dust up top. I really do hope that by focusing on small areas I can continue this simplifying throughout the house, enough to really make a visual difference, not just a temporary clean-up. 

This was a very long post about a very small topic. Thanks for reading, it keeps me honest. 

Oh, and on a totally different note, my Amy turned SIX this Wednesday - crazy! Will try to post some pictures and share about our day sometime very soon. Till then!