The January Cure: Where art thou, motivation?
I mentioned in a couple of previous posts that I signed up for The January Cure hosted by Apartment Therapy for the first time. The idea behind it is to do a small, manageable assignment every week day (with larger tasks over the weekend) to refresh and organize your home for the new year. I was super excited about the idea of doing small tasks every day to clean and organize after the craziness of the holidays. I signed up in mid-December, and I was totally ready to go, but decided to just relax my way through the holidays and get going with the refresh on January 2nd, the first day of the Cure.
Even though I had such high hopes and good intentions, I’ve done very few of the tasks so far. The problem is twofold: I haven’t had much in the way of time to do most of the assignments, and even if I did have time, I seriously lacked in motivation. I don’t know why; I usually love working on organization and am dying to get our house in order (it’s embarrassing to still be living in unorganized chaos—and I’ve been living here for going on two years). It’s January 11th, and I still have most of our Christmas decorations out. (The goal for this weekend is to get those put away at least.)
I really wanted to write about the process, but this update is quite lackluster. It’s real life, though. Ha. Here’s where I stand on each of the assignments so far:
Day 1 / Declutter a drawer
I’m counting this one because I reorganized/cleaned up all of the drawers in the dresser in the guest room over the weekend. I got rid of a bunch of old papers I had in there and tidied up the drawers that house reusable bags and the guest towels. I reminded Korri that he has approximately 10,000 ESPN magazines living in there (he told me he has every single one since the beginning…). I didn’t do anything with them. It’s hard to declutter when half of the clutter is your partner’s clutter, ha! I would love for him to go through his stuff because I would like to move gift wrap stuff to one of the drawers.
I decluttered one of the junk drawers in our kitchen (yes, we have more than one…working on that) and most of the drawers in our master bathroom and in the guest bathroom, so I’m not feeling too bad about the drawer situation. I need to reorganize one drawer in our master bathroom, and I should go through the drawers in the guest bathroom and declutter/reorganize/maybe add some drawer dividers for toiletries, but they really aren’t bad right now.
Day 2 / Make a list of projects
I having a running list of things to buy for our house on my phone, and I started a list of projects in my head, but haven’t started writing them down yet. My goal for this weekend is to get them on paper. Most of my projects involve organization and buying finishing touches, like rugs and other decor. We just discovered that the cats tore into holes under our bed’s box spring and spend time in there, so we’ll have to figure out how to close those holes so they don’t rip the whole thing! Adding it to the list…
Day 3 / Clean the bedroom + treat yourself to flowers
This was the first weekend-long assignment, and it involved everything: tidying, clearing the surfaces, washing the sheets, flipping the mattress, washing the curtains, cleaning the windows and mirrors, dusting surfaces, cleaning the floors…and treating yourself to flowers. I didn’t buy flowers because Sybil would eat them. I only ended up doing a little bit of surface tidying before feeling completely overwhelmed. We flipped the mattress a couple of months ago, but I did wash our sheets and remake the bed. A couple of days before this assignment, Korri cleared out most of his side of the room, so at least that was done. We still have a lot more work to do in here, but it was still nice to crawl into fresh sheets on Sunday night!
Day 4 / Set up an outbox
I currently have three boxes sitting in various spots around the house collecting items to donate. I will likely end up donating at least three more boxes of things once I go through everything of mine. Now I just need to actually finish going through everything and then DONATE those boxes!
Day 5 / Take a mini-meditation
This assignment involves sitting in a room with no distractions or sounds and looking around, noticing everything from a different angle / seeing it from a new perspective. I didn’t do this one, and this one is on the back burner as far as the assignments go.
Day 6 / Do a 30-minute closet cleanout
This one is pretty self-explanatory, but, shocker: I didn’t do it. I was planning to tackle the upstairs coat closet (that also houses our vacuums), but there’s a bunch of Korri’s stuff in there that I knew I wouldn’t know what to do with. This goes back to my comment from Day 1’s assignment: it’s hard to declutter when half of the clutter is your partner’s clutter. I’m thinking I will need him to commit to doing the Cure with me in the future, and that’s not easy for me to convince him to do.
Day 7 / Refresh your living room
This assignment involves walking around your living room and grabbing extra items (“visual clutter”) to store out of sight for a few weeks. The idea is to downsize the visual clutter in your space and revisit it later in the Cure. I might tackle this assignment after taking care of the Christmas decorations, but this will likely be another one that ends up on the back burner.
Day 8 / Clean the kitchen + treat yourself to flowers
This is the assignment for this upcoming weekend, so I’ll have to report back in my next update. You are to choose either the “outside” track (decluttering and cleaning every surface, including appliances) or the “inside” track (declutter the drawers and empty the fridge of expired items). I think I might tackle the outside track with Korri’s help. I cleared out our fridge a few weeks ago and it’s still in pretty good condition, and our cabinets aren’t overflowing with items (though some could be reorganized).
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I’m at around a 2.5/7 as of today (not including the kitchen assignment), so…not good. LOL. I’m hoping motivation will kick in soon so I don’t drag this on for the rest of the year. (I’m totally the type of person to do that.) I think one thing is clear, though: it’s really difficult to declutter a shared space when your partner isn’t decluttering with you and when you’re not sure what to do with your partner’s clutter! I may have to just create a box for Korri and stick stuff in it, lol. I’m not sure how he’d feel about that! Do you have any tips as to decluttering with a less-than-interested significant other?