Show after show on HGTV is built on the dream that many Americans have to get organized and stay that way. I finally figured out the best method.
Better than I can tell you, the picture above clearly shows that we needed to get organized. That is our daughter’s room after a few playdates and after Wil decided that the best place to put the remnants of his “closet makeover” was an already-cluttered space.
After we figured out the magic formula I am going to share with you in a few more sentences, this is the result:
I love it, Wil loves it, and amazingly Truth actually wants to sleep in her room now!
Ok, here is the secret: get rid of stuff! It is a must. This may not be the step-by-step guide that you were hoping for. No hide-away-extra-storage-maximize-your-space-shelving here!
I want you to seriously think about this: do you really need all the stuff that you are so desperately trying to find extra storage for? Why not store it at the Goodwill or a homeless shelter? Someone else can definitely use it—and they probably will use it more than you are these days!
We gave away 11 tall kitchen bags full of clothes, shoes, and accessories from our bedroom closet (sorry, we didn’t take pictures) and five of the same sized bags full of Truth’s clothes, shoes, and toys (pictured below).
Organization, though a great byproduct of giving our possessions away, was not the main goal. We realized that we were becoming slaves to stuff. We work to make money to buy stuff then work to make more money to buy more stuff to keep the stuff that we have nice and neat. Then, we work at home picking up all the stuff and putting it all back in its “nice and neat” spot. Then we yell at our kids and spouses for not keeping their stuff in the right place. Craziness.
In the Bible, there was a man who did a pretty good job at following the commandments but was missing one thing to inherit eternal life. In Luke 18:22, Jesus says, “…sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” I think that Jesus said this not because he wanted the man to lose all of his possessions but because he wanted the man to lose the ties that he had with those possessions.
We, in America, take pride in having a well-decorated home or having the newest technology or being a well-dressed family. In the grand scheme of things, what does that matter? In our pursuit of “the dream,” we realized that our focus was being shifted from seeking God to seeking status, style, and more stuff. Our family has now re-shifted and is seeking only God.