The past month...yes, MONTH...has seen me clearing out, repainting and totally cleaning the upstairs guest bedroom. It took a month. It will take another month to get rid of the stuff that I hauled downstairs. It is amazing that the Little Bayou House has not collapsed from the sheer weight of stuff that has been piled in it. To be fair, a lot of the clutter upstairs had to be stored there when termites decided to eat the downstairs. When there is major construction going on, you really do not want to have furniture and knickknacks in the way. So, I hauled it all upstairs. This month, I hauled it all back downstairs. Some has been discarded but it really is important to have chairs at the dining table. Putting pictures back on the walls was a nice touch, too. Yep, all of that was upstairs. All of that and a whole slew of items left behind by my kids when they moved on with their lives.
I hit a bit of nostalgia with my sorting. In a box of things that my oldest son had in his room as a kid, I found a bunch of wall plaques. These things were garage sale finds, flea market purchases or gifts to him when he decided to decorate his room HIS way. I was all for it. Nowadays, kids would never be happy doing what he did. The search for treasures was a huge part of his fun when he was choosing the perfect items. In this day and age, kids do not want "old things". It all has to be new and be exactly what everybody else has. Not my kids. They loved having the freedom to express themselves. He did exactly that. So did the other two.
Now, those "treasures" are left for me to dispose, keep or rehome. As I am going through the boxes, I often wonder if I should have kept the kids' rooms strictly "neat as a pin" instead of letting them have the freedom to decorate as they pleased. I figure it had a lot to do with letting them develop their own personalities. I can say that each of them turned out to be pretty great adults. Maybe that says something...or maybe that says it all.
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