Today (this week… the past two years…) didn’t go quite as I had planned. My daughter was going to be at daycare today and my husband and my sister were going to be at work. I was going to focus on decluttering the small table in our kitchen. But Omicron has been tearing through our neighbourhood and both my sister and I feel slightly under the weather. We’ll hunker down for a couple weeks here. I feel so lucky that we can afford to do that. I’m not working right now and my husband can work from home. We’re fortunate enough to be in a situation where we can keep our daughter home from daycare without fear of losing income. So here we are, all home together, myself with an itchy throat, my sister with a small cough, all wearing masks in hopes of keeping each other from getting sick.

But I’ve been raring to get rid of clutter, and somehow things came together. Honestly, it probably helped to have everyone home. I get demotivated very fast when I’m home on my own. Netflix is always there… waiting for me. One episode turns into a whole season and there goes my life. Aaaanyways! Back to decluttering… and to a very special table: Merlin’s table.

It sounds like some kind of allegorical reference to the mystery and magic of life together around the kitchen table. But no, my husband and I just bought a cheap old table from a man on Craigslist whose name was literally Merlin. It’s thanks to him that we can now sit together and eat our breakfast around Merlin’s table. Hmmm… actually, as you can probably see from the photos, there is only space for two people to eat there at one time. Hopefully, that will change as our kitchen is gradually transformed by the power of Getting Rid of Things.

I was going to spend more time going over the process of decluttering, but I got caught up in the rest of the story. At any rate, I more or less followed the “Steps for Working through an Overwhelming Mess” from Dana K. White’s book Decluttering at the Speed of Life, which I’ve talked about in my previous posts (the book, not the steps). It took me probably one to two hours, total, but spread out over at least 24 hours. One of the nice things about the author’s steps is that you can work on decluttering for as little as a few minutes at a time, but there will always be progress made. A lot of paper went into our recycling bin today. Many toys were returned to their homes. And now I will have the satisfaction of a clean and tidy (Merlin’s) table. Hurray!