Master Bedroom

The first room we're going to do is the Master Bedroom.  And, as I mentioned previously, the first sub-section of that room will be the clothes - closets, floor, dressers.

Peter Walsh, author of "It's All Too Much" and host of the TV Show "Clean Sweep" has a recommendation when you purge. Decide what the purpose of a room is. Make a list of all the things that room is to you. Also, make a list of all the things it is not. When you are holding something in your hand and asking, "Should I keep this?", it's easy to go back to your list of what you envision for that room.

I made worksheets to help Josh and I figure out exactly what we wanted out of each space in our house.

What do we want out of our master bedroom?

We want it to feel ROMANTIC. When you're the parents of three young stinkers, very little in the house can seem "romantic". But our bedroom CAN be. We want it to be clean, smelling good, crisp, beautiful and fairly stark. We want it to feel like a nice hotel room. We want to feel the way we feel in a nice hotel room.  ;-)  We want soft music, candles, incense. We want to be able to comfortably read in bed. (We can't now -  we don't have enough pillows, and the lighting is bad.) We both have always been in agreement that a bedroom is not the place for TV or video games. We've also agreed that our bedroom is not a place for the kids to play, so we don't have their toys to contend with in there. We also don't think the bedroom should be an office. The bedroom should be a sanctuary - the one place we can go to escape everything else in life.

But right now our bedroom is UGLY. It has yucky old wallpaper that came with the house. It has no color scheme. No time or money has gone into the decor. All of the furniture is an eclectic mix. I have random pictures and things hanging on the wall, many of which carry no special meaning to either of us. STUFF. The dog sleeps in our room, where we have hardwood floors, and I'm certain there's an unhealthy amount of dog hair and dander under the bed. Our room is not stark, it's cluttered. Our room is not clean, it's covered in dog hair and dust. Our room is not romantic. It's a mess. And it's ugly. It's a room that we're anxious to leave in the morning. We don't linger in bed. Let's get out of this room! I want a bed and a room so comfortable that I don't want to leave it in the morning.

The Closets

The biggest problem in our room is CLOTHES. Everywhere there are clothes. There's not enough room in my dresser for my folded clothes, so I pile the clean clothes on a chest. There's not enough room in Josh's dresser for his clean clothes, so they're piled on top of his dresser. Josh hangs his clothes at the end of the day on the stair railing? Are they clean? Are they dirty? I have no idea. My closet is so full that I have the hanging clothes I actually wear piled at the door of the closet. It's really insane. I have full wardrobes for sizes 10 - 20... is that insane? And yet, I feel like I wear the same clothes every day. My favorite jeans, my favorite workout pants, my favorite t-shirt, my favorite pull-over. It's hard to imagine that I have much more than that. And don't get me started on all the shoes I don't wear!

So, we're starting with the master bedroom. Josh and I's sanctuary is priority one right now. Plus, once we have it purged, it's an easy room for us to close the door and keep the kids out. (Sometimes when I'm trying to get a project completed, it seems room destruction is all the kids can find to do to keep themselves entertained.)

So, in order for me to get the master bedroom in working order, I have to have a place to put my clothes. And, to have a place to put my clothes means I'll have to purge most of them. I'll talk about the basics of a closet purge in my next post.