Before & After Clutter - 1 hour challenge

I've always loved those before and after pictures that people post on their blogs where they shoot a picture of a perfectly horrible closet or desk, clean it out, and then take another picture of the very satisfying result! A nice clean, organized desk/closet.

Clutter is my enemy. And it has nearly won the battle! I, like Pigpen with his cloud of dust, generate clutter where ever I go. I do it. The Mom. My children have taken after me. And my husband, well, unfortunately we are very similar in this respect. So I feel like I am always swimming upstream when it comes to clutter.

One of my favorite shows is Clean House.

Often on Saturday mornings I come down to a completely ruined kitchen/family room. And often on Saturday mornings I set the timer to one hour and I declutter and tidy as much as I can in those 60 minutes. It really only touches the surface but it does make the main living area look fairly nice for maybe half a day. It gets untidy at a very rapid pace. Yesterday morning, I thought, now I can put photos on my blog! I, too, can show those nifty before and after pictures!

So here goes. I give you the kitchen table.

Even worse is the kitchen island.
I also took a picture of our 'jacket chair' where all the jackets and other sundry stuff gets dumped (the red sweater is mine!).


So here are the after pictures. The kitchen island:


You can see that after an hour, I've cleaned lots of the surface but there is still a stack of mail and a little pile of odds and ends, mostly little toys. Ideally, there should only be the three glass canisters of flour and sugar. And then there is the box of pink tissues. . . But still it looks better than before! You can see more surface!


Here's my desk before:
And here it is after:

I have this long kitchen counter under my windows which is a terrible clutter trap. Here it is before:


After:Alas, the jacket chair became the stuffed animal chair, though it still looks a little neater than before.



I forgot to take an after picture for the kitchen table. Oh well.

I decluttered other areas too, like the corner by the stove and the top of the old fashioned ice box, but I am running out of time so I'll just finish with our mantle. Usually there is not line up of crosses on the mantle, but we put them up there for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and I kind of like them, so I'm not ready to put them away yet.