2 heads are better than one! Huge progress in the last two days! Before and after pictures :)

My husband is so lucky to have the next two weeks off for Christmas and New Years. Well, other than one day. I've been the one really doing most of the work as far as our journey to minimalism. I of course consult with him about some stuff, but he works a lot, and doesn't have as much time as I do normally. But since he's home for a while, we agreed to make an effort to work together a little bit each day toward our goal.

It wasn't all rainbows and kitty cats, though. He's in the military, and is used to being in a leadership position, so he's very headstrong. And me, well I hold down the fort while he's gone, and even when he's not overseas because I am the one home and who handles things here. So, both of us working together was super interesting. I will say that though we butted heads a few times, and probably got in each others way, the end result was fantastic. We now know that we need to work on being a better team, but we also know that we can really get a LOT done.

So, yesterday we cleaned our a hutch, and got rid of quite a bit. We also found some things we were missing and needed, hiding in there! Amazing what you can find when you clean up. But today was a HUGE step in our journey. I'm actually including some before and after pictures. I'll tell you what we did below the photos :)

                                                 Before

                                                 After

Now, you have to kind of look close, because it still sort of seems like there's a lot in the after photo. I can tell you we will never be true minimalists, but we are making huge strides in becoming MORE minimal. The reason it looks like there's still a lot, is some things were not even there before. I had no place for them because there was so much already there. Things we got rid of:

An entire shelf of books. Gone, in the donate box, buh-bye! All my precious moments items. Gone. 1 photo. Put away to maybe put up elsewhere. The stars and stripes box on the right, gone. The bottle decoration. Gone. And some things were moved around/added. Also we deep cleaned EVERYTHING. What you don't see, is all the items that were inside those cupboards. About 75% of what was in there, is now gone. What is still in there, is organized, functional, and CLEAN. Oh, and the DVD player, and Wii now have an actual home inside the cupboards, so they're not an eyesore.

Also, a lot of the decorations up, are Christmas stuff. Those will be put away very soon, so there will be even less going on in this area. It will be back to just basics, with a little décor. I cannot even put into words how happy I am with this transformation. And none of the items that we got rid of has any negative impact on me. Not even the stuff I've had for decades that I thought were important.