katie bowling home

View Original

the simplicity experiment

Somehow I doubt I am alone in this....

Another day ... by 11am I want to lay down on the couch & wave the white flag.  Cue Dido...

Why?  It looks like a bomb went off in our house.  Everything was at least sort of put away at 7pm last night, but now ... boom ... stuff everywhere (& crumbs on the floors too).

There are so many things I love about our house...& our possessions, but toys all over the floor ... a box of stuff to giveaway still on the dining room table a week later ... every piece of kids clothing out of the drawers and spread all over the upstairs ... dishes all over the kitchen ... and three essential oil diffusers in one room.  Why would I have three diffusers in one room?  

Our house is smaller than the average American home (which is around 2,600sq feet....ours is around 1500 sq feet), but we still feel like we have lots of space.....& lots more stuff than we need. I thought moving to a bigger house was supposed to solve the clutter problem?  No.  Clutter everywhere, and not just stuff, clutter in our schedule, too.  We are all tired all the time.  Can I get a amen!?  I feel like I don't know anyone who wouldn't tell a similar story about how cluttered life feels.

I'm a little fearful even typing this out, because I'm afraid if I say all these words out & I don't actually make a change, then I'm a phony, but I'm gonna risk it. 

I read recently, a survey found that 54 percent of Americans are overwhelmed by their clutter. Of these, 78 percent let it build up because they don’t know what to do about it.what does clutter. I know this is me. Further all this clutter is making us depressed & I feel it too. I heard someone say that people have different tolerances for visually how much clutter bothers them. I think my threshold is low, but the clutter in our house has added stress and frustration in our house. 

We have decided to say, E N O U G H. We have got to try to do something about the clutter in our lives. We don't want to live like this anymore.  So, we're going to do an experiment. woo hoo!

THE SIMPLICITY EXPERIMENT. One small step at a time, we are going to move through and try to declutter rooms in our home and spaces in our lives. We're going to try to see if there is a simpler way to live that might break the frenetic insanity that seems to define so much of how we live. We're not experts (lol, did you think we were?) We're more like willing guinea pigs.

We would love to have you follow us along on this journey & maybe you can even jump in for parts of the experiment and we can figure some of this out together! 

We will be documenting this in our facebook group & also on instagram. You can find us here & follow the hashtag #thesimplicityexperiment if you want to chime in or share your own experience.

TODAYS VIDEO