Crazy, Drastic and Wildly Rewarding

In the reflection and analysis of our life that John and I have been doing in the last month or two, we came to a conclusion...the way we had our home laid out just wasn't working for us and what God has called us to.

In some ways it never has. 

Our disaster of a home office, is a prime example. 

We have had a "home office" the entire 11 years we've owned our house.  We have only used it very sporadically during that time.  Most of the time, I work at the kitchen table and John works curled up on the living room sofa. 

So... part of the reason that I've been so quiet this month is that John and I decided to drastically cosmetically and organizationally "remodel" 4 rooms in our house:

The kids' room.
The office.
The family room.
My sewing/craft/scrapbooking room.

We're about halfway through and we've gotten rid of more junk stuff than I could have imagined.  We've bought several pieces of new furniture and made 4 trips to IKEA in the last 10 days.  We have at least 1 more trip to go.  And a pile of things to go to the donation drop off for our favorite charity on Thursday evening.  And several more stacks of paper and two file drawers worth of paper to sort through and hopefully recycle or shred most of it.  I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've said "Why on earth did we keep this?!?!"  

John has gotten very proficient at assembling IKEA furniture. 
I've gotten very proficient at getting rid of paper (something I've struggled with for a long time).

Not that we needed more chaos in our already crazy lives - school starts for me and the kiddos in August, John's leading 2 Bible studies in the next month's worth of time (starting Tuesday), we have 2 weeks and 1 day with no childcare between now and when school starts, I'm getting ready for a conference out of state, and we've been driving hither-and-yon for John to do weekend fill-in work with his seminary program.  I've even managed to up my workout schedule to 6 days a week!

It's been crazy - both at home and with all our work and school 'things'.

We've taken some very drastic steps and schedule changes.

And it's been WILDLY and AMAZINGLY rewarding.

I''ll be showing off some real "before" and "after" pictures in September but for now here's a teaser for you.... and an idea of the real mountain I've been up against cleaning out my house....and why the door to that room has always been closed when people come over :) ...

For a long time, there wasn't even this path and the pile on the left there (behind the humidifier) kept changing - it would get cleaned out and then would return with different content.  At least here the desk was usable and we could walk through the room without falling over!  (Note: I am shooting at an angle so the path isn't as narrow as it looks! Really.)

 This is standing at the other end of the room looking toward the door.  The path through the room is about as wide as the door itself.  The room is 10 ft x 7 ft.

The morning after we took this photo, the filing cabinet you see here went downstairs. The cabinet was behind/under the "pile" in the photo immediately above.  It embarrassing how little time it took to actually get everything out of the room! (And its embarrassing that I actually have photos of rooms in my house that look like the two above!  ****Sheesh***)

And I'm not going to tell you (yet) what this room is going to become! :)  You have to wait for September to find out!

I've realized that sometimes you just have to take drastic steps if you're going to get the results you want.

I've also realized that sometimes you have to change your plan - cleaning out my house was a good goal. 

Making my house functional for my family is a better goal.

Making my house function so my family can follow God's goals for us is the best goal yet!

And sometimes it takes crazy, drastic and wildly rewarding steps to get there!
How are you doing with your goals?

PS This is one of two rooms in my house that look looked like this - the other is my sewing/scrapbooking/craft room and that just got there in the last year.  Just for the record, the rest of my house does NOT look like this in any way, shape or form!  The other 8 rooms are normal. :)