Hi! I’m Lily – I’m 39 and live down on the South Coast with my husband and our two boys. We have lived in our current house for just under 10 years and I feel like our house is alternately bursting at the seams and closing in on me. Moving to a bigger property is just not an option for us right now. But even if it was, I feel like, if I didn’t address the real problems, it would just rear its head again a few years down the line, but in a bigger house, so even more stuff.

So I sat down and thought about what the problem really was. It boiled down to this – we have too much stuff – both physical and the stuff in our heads. And that manifests itself in different parts of our lives:

– I feel like I’m constantly tidying up but the house is never tidy (I feel like there are ‘levels’ of tidy, but I’ll go into that more somewhere else) 

– which means I never get time to clean 

– which means I hate having people over (although we love entertaining) because of the stress involved in tidying up/cleaning beforehand)

– because we have so much stuff, we don’t know what we have and haven’t got, we often rebuy things we already own – which obviously means we end up with EVEN MORE STUFF.

– I feel like I don’t have time for the important things, like exercise, spending dedicated time with my family, rather than tidying and organising in my spare time. Which means I feel stressy, tired and out of control.

I have a very clear picture of what I want our house and lives to be like. Calm. Simple. 

I struggle with accountability – unless someone has set me a deadline (like having people to stay), I will put off and put off sorting this stuff out. Which means that, when I do get round to sorting it, time is short and I end doing quick fixes. Which in turn means it’s never really sorted and quickly goes back to how it was.

No more. This blog is my accountability. I’m starting on a LONG journey to sort this out. And I will be documenting what I’m doing and how well it works.