reorganizing

I love to redo, rearrange, and reorganize. It helps me to see things in a new way. Sometimes I decide that I don’t need/want something anymore, and so it gets added to a container I have set aside for a benefit sale, or the thrift shop. I had been dreading the thought of putting away the Christmas things-not because of the work involved so much as I felt that the house looked so cheery. But the time had come, and so the task began... I found though, that the more thought I put into carefully wrapping the breakables in paper, and boxing the decorations, the more excited I became about the space I was seeing again on the shelves, tabletops, and especially the walls where we had exchanged paintings and pictures for Christmas items.
I started rummaging through boxes in the basement and in cabinets I hadn't looked in for a long while, and brought out some of those things to display instead. Rotating, recycling- call it what you will.
This photo shows two shelves of a hutch in the kitchen. I am still "working" on it- but I sit across from it in the morning when I am having my coffee and reading the paper, so my eyes always rest on the items there. In another day or two, with some tweaking, I know I will be happy with what I see. (Just by looking at this photo I know I will be doing a lot of tweaking.)
As you can see, there are still some snowmen on the shelves. I love their fat bellies too much to put them away right now. I will box them up in a month or so. Why the cat? For her fat belly and her expression!
This hutch gets a makeover as the seasons change- or as the holidays roll around. There were Fall/Halloween/Thanksgiving items on it before the Christmas/Winter things. There will undoubtedly be some more hearts popping up by Valentine's Day. Spring is my favorite with my floral plates, ducks, bunnies and flowery things- then the Summer display is filled with sea glass, shells and so on. The top almost never changes. It is filled with my glass bottle collection. Some are old, some not so old but are admired for their color, and a few are from out of the country and loved for their uniqueness. (That's a word- right?)
The house is, unfortunately, in a state of turmoil, with the holiday decorations half away, half not, but like I said, I love to do this because during the time it takes for me to do this, I am seeing these things with new eyes, and I can enjoy them all over again.