A few months ago, my wife and I embarked upon a mission to organize our home. In fact, we hired professional organizer and friend of ours Grace Bermudes, to help us. The moment we made the appointment with the her, my wife got into action, and I in turn followed suit. The amount of progress we made even before Grace arrived was phenomenal: we got boxes worth of stuff cleared, we bought multiple shelves for additional storage in the kitchen, I cleared out the backroom and made way for more storage, and we completely transformed my teaching studio in the front. The pictures for this blog post (collage created by my wife) show the new piano studio arrangement, including new bookshelves for my wife to store her books on the right, which freed up another book shelf for me to expand my music and teaching book area (Incidentally, we have since removed the rug entirely, which was another welcome change).
During and following Grace’s visit, the transformation continued: my wife get rid of at least a dozen boxes of things she didn’t need, and we transformed the middle room by moving her desk space to the opposite side of the room and moving the dining table next to the window. The changes in the middle room had many immediate benefits: 1) for the first time since we moved here (almost 5 years ago), my wife is happy with the location of her desk; 2) for the first time ever, our dining table is by the window, which allows us to look outside and enjoy the birds that sit on the tree. In fact, my wife has since bought several birdhouses to put out there and now regularly provides bird seed for the birds
Overall, our space has changed from one in which we were tolerating good but not great, into one we love. My wife has repeatedly expressed just how happy she is with the changes (this of course, makes me happy–“happy wife equals happy life”). Overall, I think we feel the lightness of living in a more functional home.
It’s been a few months now since we re-organized, so maybe in a way it has become the “new norm.” And yet, we both still appreciate our enhanced living space. It also has made us happier about having company over: in fact, we have held two backyard events with friends since we organized the house. No doubt this is related.
This experienced far surpassed my expectations, because for quite awhile we lived with “how things were.” The old status quo, shall we say, left a few things to be desired for both of us. And though we had talked several times about re-organizing our home, it took awhile before we finally faced that we actually needed to do something about it. The true catalyst for change in this case was making the appointment with our organizer friend. The rest was just follow through.
I like re-visiting this sweet domestic experience, because it is a great reminder of the power of inspired action. Positive change may just be a conversation away, and then, suddenly, you commit to doing something new, and a whole new experience can unfold.