My Creative Space: When Clutter and Piles Put the Brakes on Creativity

A little over a year ago, right after the holidays, I cam came to the realization that my office/craft room was not really working for me. I also had a kind of meltdown about the state of my kids’ toy room and how it was beginning to look like Toys R Us had moved into our basement. In defense of the kids and myself, they both have November birthdays so the onslaught of new things happens all at once between birthdays and Christmas. But that doesn’t make it right and all of us were suffering in our own way.

The visual clutter of the kids’ mess and my mess sucked the life right out of me! I had no desire to even go down to the basement anymore. I would shut the door and pretend the mess did not exist. I couldn’t get creative in this space. I didn’t even like to balance the checkbook in this space (and we try not to be creative with that task). The kids couldn’t find their toys and could barely step into their space without stepping on toys of every shape and size.

I found motivation after reading Joshua Becker’s “Clutterfree with Kids” (our Amazon affiliate link is here if you’re interested in checking out this great book). I liked the idea of minimalism that works for our family. We are never going to get rid of all the stuff but we can certainly become more thoughtful about what we bring into and keep in our home.

We are super fortunate to have bonus space in our basement to use for toys and hobbies but we weren’t treating that space or our things with respect. I decided we needed to make a change. I planned to move into the smaller space that was the toy room and the kids could have the larger space to play.

There were several advantages to this. Number one for me was getting to have the one basement window in my office. Even without much of a view it lets in natural light which is something I need to function at my best. Number two is the option to close the doors. Number three was that every office and craft item had to fit in the office space or the large cabinets in the family room area. No more piles. I think I’ve mentioned I’m a bit of a piler.

Recognizing that the mess was not working for us and making a decision to make a change was really just the first step. The next step was figuring out how to make a big move while everything was still in the space, the best way to go through supplies as I moved and what to do with the things I didn’t want.

Come back next week to see what that process looked like.  I can’t wait to share how I let go of hundreds of dollars in supplies and actually felt great about doing it!