Ok you know by now that we are on a mission to do a master declutter/cleanse in preparation of listing our home on the market. So I have set the next few days as master cleansing days. I expect to have guests staying with me for my brother's wedding on May 3rd, so that is a built in timelimit that I have given myself to get all this stuff done or at least most of it. My mother has graciously offered to come over this weekend to help after seeing how much we had left to do LOL. In knowing this I decided to create decluttering zones in our living room. See the weekend before, we took a lot of extra furniture to our storage facility, so our living room has the bare necessities in it and has the most open space right now. I decided to move all items that need to be packed to this area so we can just set up a packing area. We also have a section for goodwill and a section for storage. This way, everything is being moved downstairs so it can be prepped to leave the house.

So, I am starting in our sweet little Osa's (Bear) room since we are also trying to get it ready for her arrival. We will then work strategically through the top floor and down to the living room. My hope is by Sunday I will only have the downstairs area to finish.

What I find is that it is extremely easy to get distracted and start projects in one room and move to another room without even realizing it. You end up with an entire house that looks like a tornado went through it. You begin to feel overwhelmed with the stuff that is left to do and ultimately get frustrated and just stop. By strategically moving through the house and developing work zones it will help give you guidance. Now, everyone may not choose to have a downstairs prep area when you have two levels, but it helps me when I am spending family time downstairs to have everything down there so me and my mom can just focus on that area when she comes and we can easily get it out of the house. It also allows us to really see a space without all the empty boxes and stuff to leave in the way. You need to truly be able to see a room when you are decluttering/staging to make sure it appears the way you envision it. I will TRY to document the process as I go because up to this point I haven't done a good job of capturing before and after photos so unfortunately some of my postings will be pictureless, but hopefully you will be able to visualize on your own.

we aren't expecting many guests or people in our home in the next week so we decided to really try to get a lot done during this time.