day 1: the master plan

Without giving too much away, taking the first step in the 30 Day Clutter Bootcamp, means defining your plan. The short form version of mine is:

1. Motivation: I want to declutter to stop the “stuff” trap that I have fallen into. I also feel more at peace with less visible clutter, but find that is impossible to achieve when you have too much stuff.
2. Hot Spots: Upstairs closets, bathroom vanities, laundry room, office and filing cabinets, kitchen cupboards, toy room, doll area (yes we have that too), basement closets and hobby room.
3. Visioning: for fear that my husband will read this and get freaked out by what I would really like to do to our house, I will only put that I want to interchange our office and spare room, as well as our hobby room and exercise / rec room, and take back our toy room as a living room. I can only make this happen if I declutter first. The picture in this post is the view from my spare bedroom (that gets used 4 times / year) – I would really rather this was my office!
4. Action Plan: 30 minutes / day for 30 days (within 40 days of elapsed time as this is when our next house guests arrive), 1 hour per day on the weekend; reduce our stuff by 30%; closets and storage areas are our top decluttering places; mainly target things we don’t use, or haven’t touched or thought about in the last year; want to declutter until it’s done, approach it the way I have in the past when we were about to move houses; start upstairs, then the main floor then the basement as I think I need the momentum to push through the storage areas in the basement.
5. Maintenance: to make sure I don’t end up where I started, I want to reduce our Visa bill by 15% each month. This money will go to a savings account and to fund the girls currently non-existent education funds.

My favourite quote about attempting any plan is “strategy is only the outline…execution is the art”, so I look forward to proving to myself that I can’t just draft an action plan, I can also carry it out.