The urge to declutter is back! In May, I started spending five minutes in each room every day tidying things up. The results were pretty astonishing - or maybe not, since even though my house is small, my rooms are also small so there are a lot of them, lol. It would take me about an hour a day to do the cleaning. I eventually got to a point where some rooms were just fine as they were and I could skip them, so I'd try to do something super fancy, like dust

I've fallen out of the habit but will get back into it. I've been reading a book called 'Decluttering at the Speed of Life.' It's not the greatest, but there are some ideas that have helped motivate me to toss. The author says we should imagine that our homes are containers. If you have a basket to hold your scarves and there are too many scarves to fit in the basket, you have to get rid of scarves, not get a bigger basket. Take all the scarves out of the basket, and then start filling it with your favorites. The ones that don't fit are the ones you toss. Keeping that idea in the back of my mind has helped me get rid of things which just makes the house look better.

I have another renovation project that I started a few years ago and never finished. This month I plan on finishing it. In order to do that, I need to move three bookshelves somewhere else as well as some miscellaneous crap. I thought it would be a good opportunity to declutter some books last night but then I started reading them...