I don't know about you. But, whenever the New Year comes around, I love to think of ways in which I can better organize my life and clean up my messes. And, since we had a home appraiser coming over, I thought, "There's no time like the present to clean up my act!" Yes, my house was becoming a disaster! I suppose another reason I thought of cleaning up was because of the several years that I lived in Japan. It is a tradition to clean up your entire house there just before New Year's. There's a special word for it. It's called お掃除 (o-souji) or "big cleaning". The worst rooms in the house were our master bedroom and the downstairs office. While we cleaned up the entire house, I only took before and after pictures of the biggest transformations. Yes, it's sad to admit, but certain places in my house were becoming dumping grounds. When there's little time, it's easier to just dump things in piles for clean up at a later time. So, I don't need to say much. Pictures speak volumes. Here's what I've been cleaning up....
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| Transformed! |
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| A New Fresh Start for the New Year | |
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Now, for some pictures of the transformation in the office. This room has become the place to pile all messes that I didn't want to deal with. There were still piles of papers that I hadn't filed away after our homeschooling finished last Spring among other new piles of papers. I find that books/papers are my biggest nemesis. But, I finally took action and conquered these enemies.
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| All Cleaned Up and Ready for Tax Time! |
While I had already organized my pantry last year and it's not in need of major renovations, there was one thing that was really driving me crazy about one shelf, in particular. I put our salty snacks, like potato chips on the top shelf, because there's more space there for tall packages. The only problem is that random bags of half-eaten potato chips would like to slide off the shelf and come crashing down when you opened the pantry door. So, I decided to corral them, as I have many other items in my pantries, by putting them in a box. Of course, I wanted to save both time and money by not going out to buy a plastic storage box or basket. So, I just took a cardboard box and covered it with shelf liner adhesive paper and used my label maker to label it. So, here's the newly updated top shelf of my pantry. It didn't cost me any extra money to fix it up. The other plastic containers are ones that I covered and labeled last year. They were from gifts that people had given us.
I think our most important goal that Jay and I are trying to set for this year is to work hard at budgeting and reducing our debts. We have this wonderful opportunity to consolidate our debts into one payment, added to the payment we'll be making to fix my car, which broke down just before Christmas. It's thanks to switching it over to a home equity line of credit at a much lower interest rate. So, I've been working on creating a family budget plan on excel. We're hoping with our new method to pay down our debts, coupled with my new part-time job, that we might begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel to tackle the financial challenge that we've been facing for years.
Meanwhile, Penny's goal, during her Christmas break, is to learn how to cook more of her favorite Thai/Lao foods. So, we went shopping yesterday. Here are just a few of the items that she wanted to buy to start her new cooking frenzy.
I'm glad that she's getting interested in cooking. That will definitely be a treat and a blessing in many ways! How about you? What are some of your goals or projects to take on for the New Year?
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