Taking time

It´s been two years now that I went from dragging home stuff to trying to get rid of stuff I had dragged home.
Some twenty to thirty (I didn´t count them) bags of trash and recycling have left the flat for good, plus a similar amount of too-big clothes. Of the several boxes of books, nothing to say.
The kitchen, by now, is pretty much decluttered. In the other rooms, at first sight I still haven´t made enough of a dent in the amount of stuff to be stored to really create some empty space. What I have reduced is the number of homeless items, meaning that almost everything has, by now, a place to put it away.
But- I haven´t yet been able to reduce the amount of storage needed. What I had hoped for was being able to declutter some of our shelving, too, but that hasn´t happened yet. We still have three armchairs, a big sofa plus three cocktail chairs in a living room used only by DH and me. There´s still an IKEA shelf on every wall except the one with the windows in it, using up every inch of free space there is. Even after sorting out things, I still have those four chests of drawers in my bedroom, with those wooden IKEA drawer boxes on top, and every one of them is filled with small items.
When I see pictures in catalogues of rooms with minimalist furnishings, I become envious. Imagining a whole wall with nothing but a picture and a couch in front of it. Or a living room where you don´t have to zigzag between chairs and armchairs to clean.
Things in my living room are more difficult to keep up with because what I have is mostly open shelving, with only a few closed cabinets in between. Open shelves mean horizontal space, and that, in turn, means things being placed there, in front of the books. I have removed the greater part of my own tchotchkes long ago, but DH has immediately occupied the liberated space with an army of picture frames. As these are family pictures, and DH is a real family man, there would not be any reasoning with him over them. Even limiting the number probably wouldn´t work. If we had been able to exchange the rooms as planned, I could, at least, banish the picture frames to his office. But in order to do that, some of the shelving in the living room would have to go. So, that´s the place where the cat catches his own tail. If I could but remove some of those shelves, we could rearrange our flat.
The meaning of that is all too clear. I have to declutter even more things, in the hope of finally emptying at least one or two of these shelves. And that will take some more time, as I can start bigger decluttering projects only when DH is away, or over the weekend. Besides, I have decluttered most of the no-brainers long ago, so the speed at which I can declutter even more is necessarily slowing down.
With winter approaching, perhaps I can do this in small increments. Just 15 minutes every evening, for example. Maybe there´ll be a visible result by spring.
Until then, I must remind myself that I took several decades to accumulate all this stuff. I can´t realistically expect to get rid of it at once. 


Julia