I'm stuck in the closet

I've been feeling kind of stuck lately, like my life's having some trouble getting going. My brain feels cluttered and my days feel cluttered and I can't seem to generate any sort of forward motion. After pondering the situation for awhile I came to the conclusion that my feng shui is all messed up. My house is wreck, yo.

We've lived in our apartment for five years and not once have we actually cleaned it OUT. Whenever we come upon an item of questionable necessity we simply throw it in the closet. It saves us from having to make big decisions like: Do we really need a hot pink inflatable armchair?

Ours is not a very large apartment, but we've got so much junk that there's no way we can clean it out in one weekend. So we're trying to tackle one room per week. Last week we cleaned the bedroom and it's so lovely now: an oasis in an ocean of crap.

This week we set our sights on the closet. It's a big walk-in with a built-in bureau in the back that I haven't seen for about five years. We were supposed to tackle it yesterday but I didn't feel well, so we let it slide. Monte had plans to golf this morning and I was going to spend another day taking it easy. But as I stared at the closet door I felt a pressing need to get something accomplished this weekend. I decided to pull a few things out and spend an hour or so seeing what I could organize.

Two hours later the closet was empty and our livingroom was a disaster area. Monte arrived home and fought valiantly to get through the front door. Ultimately he failed and I had to excavate him from a sea of cardboard boxes.

Who knew we had so much extra stuff? Two telephones. A blender. That hot pink inflatable armchair*. Multiple windchimes. Exercise equipment. Godawful posters of nature scenes that I once thought might serve as 'art' on the walls. A revolving, battery-operated hairbrush. An incomplete set of golf clubs. Monte was truly puzzled to learn that he had two sets of skis. How do you not realize that you have two sets of skis?

Six hours after pulling everything out of the closet, we managed to fit most of it back in - in considerably neater fashion. I'm so enamored with our beautiful new space that I want to sleep there tonight.

Look! Look what we did!

I'm just so darn proud.

I'm also dusty and sneezy and off to bed.

*The wierd thing is, I could have sworn we gave that damn thing away, but it was there in closet. I think we may have actually had two of them.