January Cure 2016 – Week Three

Week three down and we are in the home stretch of the January Cure hosted by Apartment Therapy. I participated in the Cure last year so I was a little concerned that this year would be a total repeat of last years tasks. Instead, I was excited to find that this year’s tasks were completely different. I am in a different house this year so I think it would have been okay for me to do the same tasks but for those who are not such vagabonds having different tasks each January really helps you move around the house getting everything in order even if you do little more than upkeep throughout the rest of the year. Have a look at what I’ve been up to this week.

Assignment 12: Tune out Tonight

This evening (or whenever your main block of “home time” is) take a break from television, computer, tablet and cell or smart phone.

I recently started a new book, Mademoiselle Chanel by C.W. Gortner, that has me so hooked. I had not problem turning off the gadgets for a night. I laid down to read and by 9:30 I was out for the night. I think a night of decompressing and not worrying about the internet, TV or social media gave one of the best nights sleep I’ve had in a while. Maybe an hour of this every night wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Assignment 13: Lighten up the Living Room

Give your living room (or family room – wherever you spend a lot of time and/or entertain guests) a once over and remove some of the “accessories” from the room ala the Chanel quote. The idea here is to lose the extraneous things that might have started to clutter up the surfaces in the room that you perhaps just aren’t noticing anymore.

Coincident? maybe? but after my night of reading I am feeling very inspired by Mademoiselle CoCo and am happy to clear some items from my living room. Currently this room is one of my least favorites rooms in our new house. It is slightly too narrow for our furniture and extremely dark because of the sun-room on the back of the house and shady yard that block the light from getting in. Maybe spending some time clearing out the excess in this space will give me a good start at brightening up this room. I’ve started moving things out and trying different furniture hoping this will help me get this room to a place that makes me happy. The work is still in progress…

Assignment 14: Go through your bathroom and medicine cabinets, cleaning and clearing.

This one was not too terrible. Since we recently moved from Germany I recently did a big purge so there really wasn’t anything too much excess in the medicine cabinet. I did find a few things that had accumulated in the last few months that could be thrown out but mostly I needed to do some organizing and figure a better way to store things. We don’t have an actually medicine cabinet, just under counter storage so I installed some door mounted shelves like you might use for spices in the kitchen to better store the small bottled for vitamins and prescriptions. Much better than digging through a basket for all these little things.

Assignment 15: Go through your linens

Take time today to go through:

• Towels & Washcloths
• Sheets & Pillowcases
• Duvet Covers, Comforters & Blankets
• Dishcloths & Tea Towels

Pare them down as needed by sorting into three piles:

• good ones that you actually use
• ones in decent shape that you have not used in a year or more
• ones that are worn out

This one was similar to my medicine cabinet issues. There was not a lot of purging to be done but the organization still needed work. We have a nice big linen closet but for the most part I had just been filling it up to get things out-of-the-way. This week I actually sorted through and got things organized, with a few purges…

Okay so there was more purging required than I actually thought!