Now that I’ve gotten my house into a halfway liveable state with much less clutter (although still not perfect!) I realized that it is time to move on. I have to start decluttering all over again at the SO’s house so I have room to move my stuff in there.

I started earlier in the week by figuring out my plan and running it past him to make sure I wasn’t about to go skipping merrily into some huge relationship landmine. The real work started this morning.

First I collected up all of the kid’s toys that were scattered about the dining room and put the in the closet of her room. Whenever she is in residence she’s going to have to learn to put her stuff back in at least the general area of her room. Right now it sits where she quit playing with it. Moving that stuff out really opened up the dining room.

Then I tackled the kitchen. I’ve always been nervous about the kitchen. I’m moving from a dream kitchen with acres of counter space and more storage space than I could ever hope to fill to a kitchen that was probably updated last in the 1950s. The counter space is miniscule and covered by assorted stuff. The cabinets were already full.

When I took a really serious look at the kitchen though I realized that with a little rearranging things were going to fit a lot better. In fact, there was a lot of space there. That was my mission this morning. (Why is it more fun to move around other people’s stuff than your own?)

I started out swapping the locations of the dishes and the canned food. Then I realized that I’d have to purge about 1/2 the canned food since it was way past the sell by dates. (If I didn’t know better I’d be a bit concerned that he quit eating sometime in 2006.) I found some really old contac paper so I lined the shelves – something that I could never quite see the point of doing. It was so old that I couldn’t separate the paper from the backing so it is taped down. But it is color coordinated to the floor and counters so it looks pretty cool when you open the doors.

By the time I was done I had filled 2.5 garbage bags. I also had time to consider:

When buying in bulk goes wrong or why does he have a package of 500 ziplock bags?

Why does a man who I’ve lived with for 6 months and who I’ve seen eat cereal once in that time have 16 boxes of cereal in his kitchen?

Should I call children’s services when I notice that the Cheerios that he’s been giving to the kid as a snack are almost older than she is? She likes them a lot so I tried them. I’m surprised I didn’t break a tooth.

Do I throw out the Cheerios that she will actually eat (see the food aversion post below) even though they taste like drywall? I decided that I will buy her new Cheerios and damn the consequences. When I reported this to the SO he protested by saying that she probably won’t like fresh Cheerios so we decided that if she is craving the old stuff we’ll let her gnaw on the wall.

When I started running out of steam I made myself some macaroni and cheese and read a magazine. It was the first time I’ve been there doing my own thing by myself. It was the first time I really felt at home and could see myself really enjoying living there. Now I just have to get all the rest of rooms decluttered….