Happy New Year and Happy Re-zoning

The festive season has been a time of re-zoning and de-cluttering.  I seem to spend a lot of time de-cluttering mostly because I have a lot of clutter so nothing new there but the re-zoning seems to be making the de-cluttering easier which is great.

Basically my nearly 7 year old daughter has many interests and they just don't fit into her room and I want a dedicated craft area so I can leave my sewing machine up and leave projects half finished and still be able to find them again!!!

So Indie's room is now in the attic space (which was a play room/guest room) and her room has become that guest room/craft room.  This has meant de-cluttering all the stuff that is dumped in the loft space and finding room for the stuff that we actually need to keep.  The bottom of the attic stairs (photo below) now houses the kitchen stuff that was in the loft because we haven't had our kitchen re-done yet (that needs a whole other blog update all to itself!!)

Anyway this is what the loft looked like just after I had started clearing out the cupboards (below).

There is a fire escape window behind the scaletrix boxes and the high chair (below) - that was regulation when we had our loft converted in 2006 but not any more or not until "they" change "their" minds again!!

Here is the start of Indie's Sylvanian toys area!!  It is all starting to come together - very, very slowly.

Luckily some of that junk did actually make it to the recycle bin (see below.)  Mostly due to the shame I felt at having so many files of school work and other things that I am NEVER going to ever look through again.  Fortunately my DH Dave's work has a scanning machine that can double-side scan A4 documents and send them to you as an email attachment.  I am therefore throwing some stuff away after he has scanned them so I can still hoard but I can do it in an electronic non-cluttering type of way!!  Is that cheating?

Here is all the stuff that is going via Freecycle - I LOVE FREECYCLE.  Bye-bye Thunderbird toys and books that I now have on a Kindle (Kindle or any e-book reading are fantastic for the book-hoarders amongst us.)

So those are some of the pictures from the mad tidying fest that has been had in the CK household over the festive season.  I will post some more when I have managed to take the pictures of the finished rooms and the knock on effect it has had on the rest of the house.

That is the fact I do love about tidying - it does seem to have a great effect on other ideas about how things should function/work in a house.  Permaculture zoning does actually work.  Work out what you want your house to work like and fit it into the space you have.  And if all else fails do a human pyramid and everything seems ok with the world again!!

Happy New Year everyone and here's to a permaculure-y fab 2012