Taking Breaks and Cleaning Out

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Well howdy stranger!  Can you believe it’s September and school has started and we are off to a great start once again?

I’ve been quiet here for most of the summer.  I decided at the end of May that it was time for me to take a vacation from blogging.  I had not even taken a week off in the 9 years since I started.  I needed a rest.  I devoted my summer to spending time with my kids and taking fun adventures together.  I gave them the whole summer off from school work too.  We have never done that before.  We always had a few, light classes in the summer so we could stay caught up.  But we all decided to have a super calm, quiet summer.  And it has been wonderful!

We did some traveling and I visited my older kids who don’t live with us anymore and I spent time with my beautiful sister-in-law and her family.  I taught several essential oils classes at my house and enjoyed time with those friends.  All in all it’s been a great summer.

I really wanted to get some things done around the house before I started back to school and blogging, so I took on the enormous task of cleaning out our storage building.  Y’all, it was such a mess and so filled with junk that it’s been an overwhelming thought.  And since I could close the door on it and walk away, that’s what I’ve done.  For ten years.

I’m not kidding!

We got the building 11 years ago when my mother-in-law moved in with us.  She was at the end of her life and we wanted her to spend her last days here.  So she moved into our little guest house and she wanted her things around her.  We built the storage building with the plan of moving our things out of it and back into the guest house after she passed away and using it for a work room or maybe a school space.  But that never happened.  We kept just tossing stuff in there year after year until it became a burden.

I would think about it all the time and make plans to go clean it out.  But after a couple of hours I would get so overwhelmed that I would close the door with just a small section straightened up and decide to try again another day.  Then a few weeks ago my good friend Sharra offered to come help.  She said she would come over in the mornings and we would empty it out until her Suburban and my pickup truck were full and then we would stop.  It took four days.  Four HARD days.  But we did it.  I could never have finished without Sharra lovingly pushing me.

I don’t struggle with getting rid of things.  My issue is messiness.  When things get really messy I can’t think and feel like crying.  So each time there would be a bunch of giant piles of junk outside the building I would start to panic and say I wanted to stop.  I didn’t know what to do with all of it.  Throw it away?  Give it away?  Sell?  Burn?  Calgon take me away!  But she kept nudging me and and sometimes she would tell me to just sit down and take a drink (it was so hot y’all) and let myself think.  And we did it.  I owe her a million and a half dollars.  It will take me a lifetime to pay her back.

That project flipped a switch in my brain and now I’ve been on a tear to clean out other spaces in the house.  This past weekend we emptied out our guest house which has been littered with wedding décor and tablecloths since February.  Several friends were also using some of the wedding things so I was just leaving it all in there until the last wedding.  Which was in June.  And now it’s all clean too.

Then I started cleaning out drawers in my bedroom.  Am I the only one who feel like it never really gets done?

It’s hard to make big changes.  There’s always something else to do that feels more pressing.  But after writing my book, “Tightropes and Teeter-Totters: Finding Balance in the Ups and Downs of Life,” I knew I had that area out of balance in my life and it was time to put my strategy to the test.  The book is filled with ideas for getting balance in different areas of your life, not just junky storage buildings.  Cleaning it out has made me feel like I can do anything!  Grab the book for a fun read that will inspire you!

So that was my summer.  Swimming in the river, playing games with my boys and cleaning out junk.

What did you do?