Operation: Bedroom Sanctuary is still on-going, and taking rather longer than I’d anticipated. In order to decide what to keep and what to throw away, I usually turn to the well known William Morris quote: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’.
The problem with this, is that I think that everything is potentially useful and I hate waste so I find it very difficult to throw anything away. It’s part of being a scanner to find many things interesting, which means that I have things lying around as part of various projects and LOTS of half finished or still to be read books and magazines. Which leads to this:
Beside my bed.
Oh dear. On the upside, despite the stack of stuff lying on the floor, inside the bedside cabinet has been completely sorted out and I’ve found lots of things that I’d forgotten about.
Rediscovered treasures
So, what do we have here? The tiny ID bands that my daughter wore in hospital. Some vintage earrings and a knitted corsage. A badge of the moon from The Mighty Boosh live tour, and a ticket from the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. The wristbands are now in a safe place and the earrings are in my jewellery box ready to wear. I still have to decide what to do with the other things.
More discoveries.
Here we have a ticket for the Natural History Museum in Paris, the key pass for my New York hotel, and a little poem card from the Mandarin Oriental Kuala Lumpur, where we stayed as part of our honeymoon, together with a champagne cork from goodness knows when, and my VTCT membership from my massage qualification.
So, now I have lots of little clutter-causing things that I’m not sure what to do with. Back to William Morris then. Are these things useful? Apart from my VTCT card, no they are not. Beautiful? No, not on the whole. However, I think I need to add a third point to his quote: what does it mean to me emotionally?
I have decided that the perfect solution for some of these small things is to to invest in a couple of shadow boxes such as this one from Cox and Cox, which I am planning to buy and add to the bedroom. So, I’m not going to get rid of the emotional clutter but it will be displayed beautifully rather than left lost and forgotten in a drawer.
To see where the inspiration for Operation: Bedroom Sanctuary came from, you need to visit A Hell of A Woman, who began her 12 Days of Buffy challenge, along with Chapters of Claire, Minibreak Mummy and Made By Tamsin. Although they’re all streets ahead of me with this organising lark, and have now finished the challenge…
