Welcome to my website! I am Chloe Wilson, a soon to be 40 year old wife to Simon, mum to Ben (aged 10) and soppy date to our equally soppy 12 year German Shepherd, Spencer.
About 8 years ago, we decided that we craved more family time, sunshine and a laid back life. It took us 3 years to sell our house and accountancy business but 5 years ago we moved lock, stock and barrel to the Spanish countryside. Here no-one speaks English, there are no mod cons like a decent internet connection, no hypermarkets and certainly no work. But there is sunshine, beautiful mountains, more family time and peace and quiet.
We bought a shell of a house with no windows, doors, floors, electricity etc in most of it, so we got to work doing DIY. Luckily hubby is very handy but I just labored for 5 minutes and then had a 10 minute break (as he likes to remind me!). We ended up doing everything ourselves so what we thought would take us 2 years is still not finished and now we don’t get much time to work on it as we’re back to trying to earn some money. Most rooms have been dry walled, a few have been finished and painted, and about half the house has a tiled floor (the rest is concrete and very dusty).
Anyway what does all this have to do with organizing you may ask?
I guess not much other than I wanted you to have an idea of why I’m finding getting organized tough. My closet was 10 removers boxes for 2 years. My kitchen cabinets were open shelves made from concrete blocks and tiles for 1 year. I still have very few closets to store anything in so 3 rooms and 2 garages are still full of removers boxes that I rifle through every now and again in the vain hope of finding anything.
Before moving to Spain I bought countless ‘Home’ magazines and cut out pretty pictures of this and that and scrapbooked them. I dream of being organized but never seem to get there. I think I’ve got an organized mind but need help getting an organized home.
I don’t know whether it is me rebelling against my over-organized childhood, my house not having enough organized storage space or me preferring to spend my spare time (of which there’s not much now I’m chained to my PC 10 hours per day!) with my family.
I thought researching and writing about the best ways to organize things would help get me organized. That was the catalyst for this website. You’ll find a lot of my research here and I have tried to propose a system that is simple to follow for us all – and it is a system that does work for many. But I now know there’s more to it that I need to sort out first as far as my own personal situation is concerned.
I need routine in my life. If it’s not in my mental plan of things that I do every day, like brushing my teeth, it doesn’t get done.
I also need to break this huge ‘getting organized’ task down into bite sized chunks as I need to move past the overwhelm stage where I just run and hide from it. I’m looking to take baby steps that I can incorporate into my day to day life, not for a week of non-stop organizing that soon reverts back to chaos.
I don’t want to spend a lot of money on all the so called ‘essential’ organizing products out there although I will test out some of the most highly recommended.
Finally I need to figure out how to fit in organizing tasks, that can seemingly be put off until tomorrow, as well as work and family life.
I have read many other organizing blogs in the hope that reading about it would magically make it happen but to be honest, most intimidate me. I feel like I need to be superwoman to keep up and fit everything in and I’m not.
I’m hoping I’m not the only person to feel like this and that together we can help each other, whether by offering advice on what has worked for us or just by being supportive and encouraging to one another.
So here’s my promise to you. I promise to do my damndest to find some possible answers to this ‘time limited wannabe organizer’ conundrum. I will experiment, share my successes and failures and will care about yours. I will look for ways to motivate us and will support your efforts but kindly ask that you encourage me too.
So take a look around and join me on my organizing journey. Follow my progress and please get in touch as I’d love to chat about your issues and ideas.