The Plan

We need a plan for the whole house, and a plan for each room. This is how we stay focused on our goal.

I'm going to borrow heavily from author Peter Walsh's book "It's All Too Much". You should certainly support the author and get your own copy of the book. However, I know you are also trying to cut down on the amount of stuff you own... self-help home improvement books included. So, consider some tidbits to be an applied Cliff Notes version of Walsh's fantastic book.

Walsh writes, "Imagine the life you want to live." How Oprah-esque. But, it's true. I am imagining how I want the house to look, what I want its purpose to be, and how I want to feel in the house. This will make purging stuff that doesn't support my vision so much easier.

Walsh gives some great questions to ask yourself of each room. Being Type-A, as I can have a tendency to be on these type of projects, I actually turned the questions into worksheets - One worksheet per room and one set of worksheets for me and one for my husband, Josh. (Josh, once again, accused me of procrastinating by making worksheets. Can he not see how completely productive I'm being? Gee whiz!)

The questions that Walsh recommends asking yourself, worksheets or no worksheets, are:

For the whole house-

• Does this house look the way I want it to look?

• Does this house feel like a home to me?

• How do I feel when I come home to this place?

• How do I want to feel when I come home to this place?

• How do family members feel when they come home to this place?

• How do they want to feel when they come home to this place?

For each room-

• How do I feel when I enter this room?

• How do I or my family members want to feel when they enter this room?

• What is this room's function now?

• What is the function I want it to have?

• In order to serve its function, what should the room contain in terms of furniture, contents and open space?

I have to say; Josh was such a trooper and filled out all the worksheets. It was very interesting and eye-opening to see how unhappy we both are with how our house is currently set up. It was also interesting to see where we differ about the functions of certain rooms. For example, I see one of the living room's functions as being a play area for the kids. Josh does not. Josh sees the craft room as being a play area for the kids. I do not. I see the foyer as a place to sort and store mail. Josh sees that function belonging to the office. My worksheets, silly as they sound, really gave us the opportunity to talk about things we'd never thought to talk about before. We were able to negotiate and come up with a plan we could both agree on.

Do you envision that your kitchen counter's function is really to pay bills? Great! Then you know to keep envelopes, pens and stamps in your kitchen, and you can purge them from your office. But, if you envision that it's a function for your office, you can get purge or move all of the bill-paying stuff that's in your kitchen. Easy as that.

Or, in my case, do clean clothes belong on the folding table in the laundry room, or do they belong folded up in the dresser drawers? While the answer seems obvious, sometimes I need a plan and a vision to kick-start my motivation. My laundry room's function is not to store clean clothes.

Start working on your plan with your family. And, if you aren't feeling Type-A enough to make worksheets, let me know- you can borrow mine.