Clutter - The Bane of my Existence

I'll be finishing up Stage 3 today, along with grocery shopping, getting a chicken late tonight so that we have a nice, hot rotisserie chicken when DH gets home later, and among other items on my agenda, I'm going to be polishing all of the remaining liquid silver items from the shop, making them nice, bright, shiny and beautiful once again. That's actually pretty easy to do, but requires careful attention to not mix up the price tags of the items. I'll pull my non-food dehydrator from the shelf for this one. The strands have to be completely dry before I return them to the shop, but a few hours in the dehydrator will do the trick. 

I have a round food dehydrator similar to this 
one - not this brand, but the same style. I bought 
it years ago on Etsy to use for my metal clay 
work, and I also use it for other non-food uses. 
I'd like a new dehydrator for food, but I'll wait 
on that until I actually have room to store one. 

I suppose not many people have a kiln, a dehydrator, an overused toaster oven, bottles of propane gas and shelves full of enamels in their laundry room. I also suspect their laundry room doesn't have a six-wheel stone polishing machine, a metal rolling mill, and several stone saws, along with all of the non-electric woodworking tools that DH uses. If this list makes you exhausted and thinking "My goodness, what a lot of stuff to have in one room", it's far from comprehensive, because of course there's also the Bow-Flex and the washer and dryer, welcome to my cluttered world. 

Clutter isn't healthy for the mind, and we've actually 
done a lot to organize and put things away, but we're 
trying to merge the store and home, and that's a bunch 
of stuff we brought over from the shop that needed to 
be incorporated into home. DH built wonderful things 
to accommodate the new items, but we're still 
working in a finite space. 

As a multi-media artist, I express my art through a lot of different media. Over the years, I've tried a lot, discarded some, and incorporated others in bits and pieces into my artistic life. I think one of the reasons why I like writing fiction so much is that it really doesn't take up a lot of space. I have my grammar and punctuation books nearby, but except for the computer and printer (and paper for the printer), it's pretty minimal. My art, on the other hand, spreads throughout the house. 

Sharon's room shares space with my Rio Grande 
spinning wheel and my drum carder. I adore both 
of those pieces of equipment, and there's no other 
space that will keep them in good condition and 
undisturbed, so Sharon's Room it is. 

I have spinning wheels in three different rooms. I have my fiber arts behind Sewing Room cupboards 1, 2 and 3 (remember the great clean? They're still working quite well, although #1 now also contains the knitting machine and yarns for that equipment. I have my books I want to keep - Tolkien, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Goldsworthy books of art and artistic inspiration, and of course books on Egypt, hieroglyphics, and monuments., all located in Sharon's Room (along with my largest spinning wheel and my fiber drum carder). 

I use my blender at least 2X a week to make my 
next four veggie smoothies, or "Ogre Juice" as 
DH terms it. I rely on those for my nutritional 
needs and I've grown to love them over the 
past nine months or so. 

My kitchen actually is devoted to food preparation and eating, my dining room has been taken over by overflow from the living room - things we decided to not replace in the main room after we had new carpet installed and the wallpaper replaced with the lovely abstract we currently have (and, of course, the new draperies, which are wonderful). However, back to topic, the dining room is a mess. I'm in that room often now, because that's where I store my blender (no room in the kitchen cabinets, and I'm using the blender at least 2X a week). 

The living room is lovely, although I have a couple of boxes of pottery that need to have assigned homes, and DH leaves his Renaissance Faire pouches and carryalls on top of the blanket cabinet for the year. Not where they're supposed to be, but I really can't scold, I'm just as bad in other rooms. 

I can walk through the living room in the 
dark, no problem. The kitchen is also no 
problem, I wouldn't want to try this in 
the dining room or the craft room, though. 

So, generally, it's a mess. I want this house cleaned - I'm tempted to rent one of those tubs and do a major throw-out. You would never believe that I've taken box after box of books to Half-Price Books, or that we've redone so much. And of course, after the basement storeroom flood of August, I have half-destroyed boxes of stuff cluttering up my craft room so that I can barely walk through there. 

My 2022 goal? Retrieve my house. We moved into here in 1984, it needs a Deep Cleaning, and I'll have to talk DH into getting rid of some stuff. We're both pack rats, and that's a dysfunctional habit that we'll have to try to get under control. What a PITA! I'm heading off to the pool to at least swim in an uncrowded lane, maybe sharing with one other person. I need some open space around me. Have an excellent Wednesday and I'll be back tomorrow.