Making room for living

As our new easy chairs have arrived today, the weekend turned into one big decluttering and furniture-shuffling exercise. Part of my IKEA shelves were scrapped, instead we put DH´s massive bookcase in that place. The closed parts of the shelves that had to go fit exactly into what were the still exposed shelves of the other ones, which means that we have now a closed cupboard instead of open shelving mixed with closed parts. 

The most important result is that there are barely any horizontal spaces left that would allow to put things upon them. Of course, a lot of what I thought was visual interest in the room has gone, too. 

But, what visual interest really meant was tchotchkes , bric-a-brac and family pictures. 

What is really amazing is how much calmer the room looks without all that stuff. A few choice pieces have gone on the still-open shelves on the third wall, and the rest is either inside the closed cupboards or in the trash can. 

In order to make room for the new arrivals, we also tossed the remaining IKEA easy chair and DH´s big dark couch, which means that we now have mostly uniformly colored wood and, after all is said and done, seating for a maximum of six people (we kept the danish design chair and my Grandfather´s easy chair). Which is quite a step forward from the ten sitting places we used to have and leaves plenty of open space between the seating arrangements, especially since we picked modern chairs that are looking a lot lighter and less massive than the old couch. 

Once again, taking things away has been the way to creating a better feeling for that room. 

In retrospect, we should have arranged things differently from the start when DH moved in with me. The big furniture pieces he brought plus the ones I already had were just too much stuff in too little space. 

And we used to make things worse by adding stuff instead of subtracting it. 

Case in point: the old VCR I still kept, plus about three feet of videotapes on a shelf. We haven´t watched any video tapes for many years- the device wasn´t even plugged in any more. The DVD player on top of it was what we used if we wanted more movie entertainment than 50 cable channels could offer at all. 

So, we decided that we didn´t need the VCR and tapes any more. If we ever wanted to own one of the movies again, they are all available on disc. Somehow, I am rather certain these discs will never enter our flat. 

And I cleared out all and sundry of my pocketbooks that I could reacquire on my e-book-reader if I wanted to. 

Having to pull out the complete stuff in the closed shelf compartments anyway, I still found plenty of things I decided not to put back, which meant freeing up several of those compartments completely. 

The chests of drawers had been the target of a decluttering session several days ago already, which included plenty of cables and chargers for gizmos I don´t even own any more. 

Lo and behold, even DH decided, when he saw the purge taking effect on the look of the room, to go through his own stuff and let go of his old "lava lamp" and a cheap imitation "petroleum" lamp whose wiring was faulty and which we had kept on top of one of the shelves for decoration. 

The astonishing part, for me, is that there was still so much stuff around even though I had been decluttering fiercely two years ago, finishing with the conviction that this was the lowest I would go with my stuff.

Looks like I was wrong.

And the side of the room where we didn´t yet change anything looks decidedly cluttered now compared to the other half. The culprits are mainly the decorations. Perhaps we´ll get around to repainting the room this summer. I know already that not all of the pictures and wallhangers will be replaced afterwards. 

There still is plenty of work to do, but right now, I just enjoy my "new" living room. 

Julia