How the Huzz Rocks the Condo

I have a wonderful husband. He’s been especially thoughtful and helpful lately with my lack of energy due to little Peapod expanding inside me and sucking all my life forces. I’m finally through the first trimester, which gives me hope that I’ll be more… Dawnish soon.

We were all sick for two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s and despite Brian’s sickness he has: gotten rid of our big dining room hutch, installed shelves to hold what used to be in the hutch, put up a whiteboard that the boys love, put lights in our always-dark living room, put up more shelves in the boys’ room, and been doing little things like making the boys elephant toast (with no help from Pinterest, he doesn’t know what that is), his experimental and delicious mega bacon burgers, his signature mega-awful waffles, and in general taking care of a lot of our meals. He got up with the boys over Christmas break while I slept in until morning times that start with 9s and 10s. He takes the boys out so I can nap. Maybe I should be pregnant more often? Nah.

 Brian is a big fan of de-cluttering, and I also am in theory, but unfortunately I have a harder time parting with things than he does, and in buckling down and facing facts such as, our pantry organization makes absolutely no sense anymore, and why do we have fifteen pairs of shoes in the entryway when we have closets?

 With Peapod coming in July to join our two-bedroom-condo family, all our de-cluttering and rearranging is with that little bundle in mind. (Small homes grow tight families, right?) When we first found out that I was pregnant Brian got rid of our bedroom dressers and put shelves up with boxes, which are now our drawers. (I have fabric to cover all the boxes and so far have covered three. Oops.) I was reluctant at first (Aren’t you supposed to have dressers?), but we now have room for a crib and changing table in our room and I don’t miss the dressers. He moved our recliner from the living room to our bedroom, which opened up our living room for the many wrestling matches, and hockey, baseball, football, and basketball games that spontaneously break out every day.

Over the break, we kept going. We moved our forever-cluttered shelf from the entryway into our bedroom. Now there’s actually room to turn around and take your coat off when you walk in our door. Maybe even inhale deeply. I cleaned and reorganized our pantry, Brian cleaned our balcony, and he’s got stars in his eyes thinking about going through our storage closet to get rid of more stuff. We've made a drop-off run to Goodwill and sent some end tables from the living room and our bikes to Brian’s parents’ lake house.

This is the kind of constant culling that I think is necessary to remain sane and generally clean in a small place. I’m glad I have my handsome, de-cluttering huzz to nudge me to keep it up.

PS. While I wrote this post he did piles of dishes and cleared the counters, which confirmed to me that he rocks. And then he asked me to get rid of one of my tea sets, which confirmed to me that I like things. 

Here are some pictures of our snug dining room before the re-do:

See the computer shelves crowding the back corner.

Clutter-magnet hutch...

I could clean it up...but it still made our dining room tight.

Brian took everything out and off, our computer shelves down,
and put the leaf in our table...

and put up high shelves, a white board, and a shelf for art supplies.

Now Cal can draw ceiling fans to his heart's content.

And we can all sit down for dinner comfortably!

...and learn numbers and draw monsters....

and make dot-to-dots in Batman masks and capes and
sock gloves...

and learn sight words and keep track of  fruits and veggies eaten.

More shelves in the boys' room

and even some above the bookshelf

Dad makes elephant toast!

Mega bacon cheeseburger (water bottle for scale)

Mega double cheeseburger (children for scale)

Here's a link to our tale of how we got rid of our storage unit a couple years ago.