I’ve never been an organized person, but in my head there are certain “looks” or “moods” I favor, so when I think about how to organize a space in the house, I keep those thoughts in mind.
One is hanging herbs to dry. I do have a dehydrator…somewhere. In August of 2015 we were packing up every single thing in our house, preparing to move into tiny barn, and negotiating like crazy to get the sale of our house finalized so we could attempt to buy the house we live in today. Four years after packing up boxes, and I still haven’t unpacked a lot of them (hence my desire to dive into the minimalist living).
Anyway, back to the herbs. A friend had a lot of Rosemary left over from a wedding, so I decided now was the time to find a big stick to hang in the kitchen and start drying. My first visitor since putting it up said it is very “witchy pagan”, which was the look I was going for with the drying herbs, so yay!
On with the collections versus clutter thing though. I love to collect things. My girls love to collect things. My husband loves to collect things. As you can imagine, six people in the house with collections equals an unorganized mess! How do you choose what’s important to you? How to display it?
Thankfully, some things we all enjoy collecting together. The girls got their love of rocks and minerals from me. My career goal was always geology/archaeology, so for as long as I can remember I always had a box of rocks in my room. Now that I own a house, they’ve spread out to almost every room!
Books are another thing we tend to collect. Luke and I aren’t avid readers, but we can’t seem to pass up an old, dusty book. Homeschooling doesn’t help with this, because our excuse is always, “well, the girls could use it for school”.
We recently switched our “dining” and “living” room areas. Now we have a dedicated room as our dining room, and the living room is half of the large room that has our fireplace. Before, we called the entire room the library, because we have floor to ceiling shelves of nothing but books. Our goal is to custom build bookcases with the rolling ladder for that section.
The weirdest collection to others is my bone collection. I don’t have much, and it’s mostly chicken bones, but bones are always something that has fascinated me. I kept my wisdom teeth when I needed them removed. I kept the extra bones from my feet when I had surgery in 5th grade. It’s just something I’ve always liked.
I’m not sure how I’ll go about keeping these collections displayed neatly, while trying to organize and de-clutter the rest of the house, but it’s a goal I’m working towards!
Until Next Time!
~Holly