Gorgeous Monday morning and a delightful August Airing

Lately the weather here has been really lovely. We've spent the last two - three days with the windows wide open and breezes dancing through the house accompanied by bird songs and symphonies of crickets in the evening. Bliss.

It's been wonderfully freeing to enjoy the cooler weather and be serenaded by the sounds of nature. Obviously, autumn is around the corner, and yet it's still blissfully summer. Perhaps that is why I am so inspired to let go (other than that little fact that I am in full blown nesting mode).

This weekend, in my extremely productive nesting mode, we began to reorganize and go through our "stuff". (My husband is going to be happy to have a "break" after the baby comes. :) ) After my last post on simplicity, as much as I love the idea of getting rid of all our stuff and replacing things, and not obsessing about stuff, the fact is, we have stuff, and we use the stuff, and though I'm not passionately attached to the stuff, I do enjoy some of it.

I like the way I feel when I picture having only the essentials, and I do believe that it would be more freeing. Honestly though, I'm not ready to take it that far. It's one thing if the stuff were destroyed, or if I had an easy way to sell it. Then, maybe I'd reconsider. But for now, I don't want to spend extra money or go through the trouble of replacing something that is being used - that'd be a waste. However, it doesn't mean I can't take a good look at the stuff around me, and figure out what's not being used or not working, and let it go.

So, this weekend, we started with the dinning room. In my dinning room, we have the dinning set that was my grandmother's. The table and chairs are showing their age, the display cabinet is huge and bulky, and if someone offered us a price that would enable us to get something more practical, we'd probably sell it.

After this weekend, I took something that had been annoying me, something that I wanted to replace, and made it useful. What once was a display for dishes and tea sets, is not a serene cabinet that still holds those things, but also 2 book shelves of homeschooling and art supplies, neatly tucked behind gorgeous fabric panels.

The end result was not only a more serene dinning room (serene is good with a pregnant momma), but spilled over into part of the kitchen, living room, and bed room. Another Good Will pile has been started, and this time, it was much, much easier to let things go. There are still things that will end up on our ambivalence pile as well, but if we have a doubt, it goes there for now.

Thus, we may not be down to the bare essentials, I'm not sure if we ever will, unless moving across county or to another country, or some other event where we would absolutely need or have to, we may not. And that is okay. The thing is, it gave me a great perspective on what is possible, and what is present. And the end result is a divinely spacious, better functions, and much more organized dinning room with less stress over having to look at all the stuff.