Clearing the Clutter

I can't quite believe we've been living in our "new place" almost five months now. I had a friend recently come over that had never seen the new place and she asked if we had moved in recently. That should give you all an idea of how messy and over lived in the place seems. Every time I try to get the house under control it seems I can only handle a room or two and then it all goes to hell in a hand basket.

So, I was thinking I would post my accomplishments and ideas here to the web to hopefully kick my butt into gear. After all if you all out there in cyber land are expecting a nice clean house to see pic's of then how can I disappoint? For now I'll just imagine that there are hundreds of you readers out there, though I'm sure that number is much closer to one or two.

I've asked my fiance to have a cleaning day this weekend. I'm thinking perhaps if he and I work at it together I can't procrastinate as bad as usual, though I'm worrying that he'll only help me procrastinate even more :P. I think part of my problem is that I don't really understand what clean is to me.

There are so many different levels of clean. There's the white glove clean, then there's the toys under the bed clean. Which one am I okay with? I think that's what everyone needs to figure out before they really tackle a big cleaning like a whole house, even if that house is only five rooms big. Part of what I've figured out is that I need some empty space. To much clutter makes my head cluttered and I just can't stand it.

I recently went through our game shelves and purged. I took out ones that I didn't want(though those were rare), and more likely those that we just didn't use. We really don't have friends over that often so keeping a ton of games where I can see them on a daily basis just seemed like it was creating a wall. First, it was creating extra clutter for me to look at and second it was taunting me reminding me how I didn't play the games I had. I've now gotten it down to one shelf of games and an empty shelf and let me just tell you when I sat down after cleaning and saw that empty shelf it was like my brain woke up and pushed it's way through a brick wall. I breathed and inner sigh of relief.

Now, looking around the rest of my living room I'm noticing all the movies I don't watch, all the books I haven't looked at in ages and I wonder, how great would it feel to purge those too?