F**K IT MILES, GIVE ME SOME PRIVACY

Once you start postponing, you'll lose track. This is exactly what happened to me. I started bundling up the daily challenges and eventually forgot about the bundles too. In other words I completely failed April's challenge of daily decluttering every nook and cranny of the house. As it happens, my friend was in the town during April and wanted her IKEA canvas back that I had been storing for her for years now. Talk about law of attraction. Once you start moving items forward, the rest follows. The good news is that: 1. I watched a documentary called Minimalism and it really did inspire me to tackle the ever-growing pile of stuff in the house and question every new "need" for stuff. 2. I managed to get rid of a lot of stuff. I donated to King's Day Sales, I took things to the recycling centers where the items are sold for a small profit, I took some great books to small miniature libraries around the city and I simply cut four cargo bike's full loads ...

I have fallen back a lot in my cluttering challenge. Turns out it has become my worst challenge month so far. It's simply more than I can handle. However, I've been doing things in my own phase, which is great as well. I started by cleaning the backyard last week. Now that it has been days and kids are roaming free there, I can't really tell the difference anymore, but at least for a brief moment it was nice. My daughter helped me to sort through our books. We removed one meter of books from our shelves. We were being brutally honest about which books we never truly pick up to read and went from there. We were still left with a few meters of books, so zero harm done. Now with less books it's also easier to find exactly those we are looking for. We also organized the books by language, so now we have one section with Finnish books and another one with Dutch books, and then another one with English literature and a tiny section in Italian. Image: pix...

It has been over two weeks of this challenge and yes, I am getting slightly fed up cleaning something extra every day. It's hard enough to keep up with the basic necessities, let alone adding an extra task to every day. However, this time I was lucky, because two of the subjects don't really apply to us, so I could take it a bit easier on those days. Day 13 challenge was to clear up that drawer everyone's got in their house, a junk drawer. We have this one in our dining area and we put stuff in this drawer that we sort of need at hand occasionally at least, but not all too often. Yet the junk is odd enough that it doesn't really fit anywhere else, thus it all collects at the bottom of this drawer. Image: pixabay.com Our junk drawer had for example the following: - Batteries (both unpacked and drained) - Bike lights (red ones and white ones) - Small screw drivers - Low quality sandwich bags that sometimes come in handy for something else than sandwiches ...

These are the last three days of going through anything related to clothes or getting dressed. Day 10: underwear drawer The things you think are easy to go through... yet it's the day that will confront you about your body the most. Nothing makes you question your body more than having to ponder through your underwear what you wear and why not . However, in the end I was left with a neatly folded and organized pile of underwear and pajamas and anything that I wasn't comfortable wearing got kicked out. Now all of it is stuff I love and feel happy in, so in this way also what originally seemed like a simple thing to organize, turned out to be confronting AND liberating! Image: pixabay.com Day 11: accessories I'm not really sure what accessories all hold in. Belts, hats and that sort of stuff I guess. I moved most of our winter hats away from our hallway basket and moved in some summer hats. I hope I'm not too optimistic about the weather though. Kids got e...

Most of us have seen the endless pictures of plastic pollution and have heard about the Great Pacific garbage patch the size of Texas floating in our biggest ocean. We are aware the coral reefs aren't doing that well and forests are disappearing at an unimaginable rate. More often than not, we are scared to act, or simply scared, but there's another approach as well. Underneath I've gathered some great projects and innovations that need our attention and support to make the critical change for all of us: 1. A new fully biodegradable packing material by Sulapac made out of wood to compete in the same exact market as plastic  Two Finnish female scientists with background in medicine and biomaterials, Suvi Haimi and Laura Kyllönen , are the founders of Sulapac , a company producing biodegradable packaging materials. Their innovation is making this particular packaging material one of the greenest options in the world. The company is currently negotiating piloting proj...

I'm finally getting the hang of decluttering. I'm slowly starting to understand when I lie to myself with the thought "Oh, I'll possibly use this later", which I'm learning to respond with an honest thought "Are you SERIOUSLY going to use this later?" More often than not, the answer is no and off it goes. Because day 8, 9 and 10 of the decluttering challenge were all related to clothes, I decided to divide my task by doing only a fraction of it on the weekend. I have always loved my kids' clothes. They are a collection of new, hand-me-downs from friends, presents from relatives and there are even some of my old ones in there. Often their outfits remind me of our friends and family and it's such a nice addition to the function of clothing.

Yesterday's declutter challenge was to go through makeup and skin care items and today's challenge was jewelry stash . I decided to do two birds with one stone, because both of them are very easily done. I read this week that if you say you only use very little makeup, it makes you a misogynist, because apparently it belittles those who use more makeup. I stated this exact thing only a while ago, so I guess that makes me a misogynist. Although, let me be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with using lots of makeup and enjoying the artistry of makeup. It's just not for me. The reason I use very little is because I don't know how to use it properly! For the photo I was scraping things together, so it includes my hand-cream as well, since it's a skin care product. I don't know if I should admit this publicly, but I "take care of my skin" by washing it in the shower. I have zero products to apply directly to the skin. I just never...

Apparently pollen allergy is good for something. Last month when I started to get the first symptoms of pollen allergy, I went through our medicine box only to find out my allergy medicine had expired. While going through the box, I cleared out what seemed to be expired as well, so that made my job today a lot easier. On the left: before shot of the medicine box. Top right: after shot of the medicine box. Bottom right: empty packaging materials. I wiped the medicine box that had collected a lot of dust. It's on top of a shelf in the kitchen, so the kids can't reach it and it gets very dusty up there. I took everything out of the box, read each expiration date and moved the old ones out. I also took my tiny medicine box out of my purse to make sure all of those pieces were up to date - and some of them weren't. I carry this first-aid kit with a few band-aids, pain medication, allergy medication and tick tweezers with me at all times. The tweezers were a gift fr...

I avoided this until the evening, because I thought I had it in the bag. I thought that "my linen closet is fine, there's not much to do, unless I decide to iron everything." So here are my confessions about today's subject: 1. I don't have a linen closet. It's a drawer. 2. I don't iron my bed linens. My parents used to have an electrical mangle/wringer (I had to google the word for it, so I'm not sure which one I should use) and I remember watching the sheets getting all pressed in it. It was one of my favorite things as a kid. Yet doing it myself seems very foreign. I also don't iron by hand all our sheet, because I'm not ready to lose the remains of my sanity for such an idle chore. 3. I change our sheets every 1,5 to 2 weeks and when someone is ill, then more frequently. In normal circumstances any longer feels iffy, any less is too much work. So I thought I had this in the bag before even starting. To be honest it only took me 20...

I really stalled this one. I only started to clean the oven after dinner and the rest (microwave, coffee machine, table tops, stove etc) I only did when the kids were already sleeping. Today the biggest challenge was to get the oven clean and I must say I'm not completely happy with the results. To get the stains out, I made a paste according to Pinterest that was supposed to basically let me wipe the dirt off. First of all the paste wasn't as pasty as I was hoping for, although I followed the recipe exactly. I let the paste in the oven for half an hour and then I wiped the foamy paste off, but the change wasn't drastic at all. I had scrub the trays by hand over the sink, which must be one of the most annoying household works. The glass of the oven remained yellowish and the bottom tray that is there to catch any drips remained stained, but at least it's as clean as I could get it. In the future I won't attempt another one of these pastes as any regular way of cle...

I thought I had my pantry under control, until I took the before shot and realized it's messy af. I just always seem to find things, so I hadn't thought about organizing it for a few months by now. It would be easy to blame the mess on my husband or my daughter, who alto contribute in putting stuff in the pantry, but the reality is that I, too, often don't pay too much attention to what goes where and how as long as the door closes. We have very limited cupboard space in the kitchen, so some of my baking and food preparing supplies are also in our pantry closet. What really surprised me was the fact that I was able to fit all the bubbly water bottles in there and still have enough space for whatever comes next. The good news is that there were only a few little things I had to throw out because they had expired. I also got rid of one vase and few other items that were in there that no longer serve us. My donation box is soon getting out of hand, but at least I foun...

In the fourth month I move onto my fourth monthly challenge of the year. If last month was physical, so is this month, because I'm basically going to clean the whole house including every nook and cranny. On the first day of the month my job was to clean the fridge. Good thing our refrigerator is so small that we cannot store anything we don't use for too long - or so I thought. At the back of the top shelf I found a jar of opened jalopenos that had started to mold. I also threw out a mustard that expired in 2016, but most of all I simply took each shelf and drawer out and gave them a good bath. Normally I just wipe the shelves if I notice they are getting sticky or not looking clean. Sometimes I even manage to ignore this for quite a while. This time I really scrubbed the entire refrigerator well and even changed some of the ways I've been sorting things in there. Now the small condiments fit nicer on the door instead of being hidden all the way at the top shel...