3 simple steps: making room for the festive season
Hey everyone, It's been a while since I wrote one of these, won't bore you with the details as to why :) The upcoming weeks I will post simple steps that focus on helping you to have a great festive season, stress free and blissful. Today's focus is on creating a wonderful space in your home for December. Here we go!Step 1
Visualize
This should be the first step in any undertaking. What is your vision for your home for the holidays? Do you want to go all out with christmas lights and a tree, and tons of decorations? Or do you want your home to have a calmer glow? What do you want to do to bring light into the cold dark winter months?
Just walk through your home with a notepad, and write down everything that comes to mind while you walk. Then pick one room where you will create the atmosphere you dream of. You can always move on to another when you are done. Not taking the whole house as a goal is a step that will ensure you set yourself up for success. For the rest of the post I will assume you choose the living room for this. Step 2
Clear
Get some boxes, and remove everything that doesn't fit in your vision for your living room. Box trinkets, frames, anything that doesn't go with the vision you have made for your room. When you do this you remove things that didn't do much for you, but still are in the room because they always were there, and open yourself up for decluttering them later. Put things you want back in your living room in January in a separate box. Tape the other boxes shut. If you haven't touched them in a month's time, just declutter the contents.
Then clean the space, and maybe do some furniture reshuffling, until the room just feels welcoming and comfortable when you walk into it. When you remove frames you may run into the wallpaper colour being different behind it, because the sun bleached it out. What you can do then is get a picture that fits right with the season, and put it in that frame. That way you keep the festive theme throughout your room.
Just remember, an object is just an object. They don't have memories, you have them. If you for instance have a really ugly china sculpture that you keep around because it was from your grandmother, just take a picture of it, and then declutter it. Step 3
Decorate
Now your living room is a blank canvas, you can get out your decorations, and start putting them around the room, keeping the vision you have in mind. Then sit in your favourite chair and enjoy your wonderful and festive room.
2 comments
Nov 20, 2009
Robert said...
Great tips, and that is exactly what i am doing this season :) I told Eddie to wait until we de-clutter the main rooms before we start heavily decorating :D
Nov 20, 2009
Tamlyn Leigh said...
I told Mar the same thing! :D Next weekend we are off for a short trip to one of my favorite cities, then I'm going to start. I have done most of the decluttering in the living room, the kitchen is a whole different story *smooch*
