We have less than two weeks left before we leave Las Vegas. My house is in a state of controlled chaos. We have a lot of stuff packed, and a lot of stuff not packed.

Then there’s my energy level. I’ve been on the edge for a few weeks now, and I have a few weeks left before we get back to a sense of normalcy. I’m still working (last day is this Friday) and I feel like I’ve had very little, if any, time to relax. But this move is a good thing.

We’ve been taking loads of stuff to donation centers every weekend.

We will be close to my family and not so alone anymore.

We will get a fresh start, which after the past few years, is sorely needed.

But first, there’s a lot more stuff that still needs to be boxed up.

Mister and I have been busy packing everything away and getting ready to schlep it all across this great country of ours. The picture above is the back half of our living room. The bookcases are empty, over a dozen boxes of book are piled up in the garage, and we started in on the kitchen last night.

By the way, books are heavy. I’m glad that we’ll have my young, strong nephew coming to help us load it all into the truck.

We took all the decorations down from the tops of the cabinets last night. What a huge difference that made in making the place look packed up! Today we’re going to pack up all the low-priority items in the kitchen. We have a ton of kitchen stuff, and we can do without a lot of it for the next few weeks.

Few weeks. We have less than a month to go – 28 days to be exact! And I have just 3 short weeks of work left.

Next weekend, we have a friend coming to visit us from California before we take off for the east coast, so the guest room needs to stay intact for the time being. But we did take out pretty much all the decor and furniture, so all that’s left in there is the bed and a nightstand. As soon as she leaves, that stuff gets disassembled.

We’ve spent a lot of our free time packing (when we weren’t being sick – both of us got some sort of fast-acting plague over the past week), and there’s lots more to be done. Not to mention a few craft projects that I need to finish up before packing up my crafty supplies. It’s gonna be a busy and exhausting few weeks!

Over the holidays, I had a ton of time off so Mister and I used that to our advantage to start organizing, decluttering, and packing. Our Leaving Las Vegas date is just under 6 weeks away, and we still have a lot to do, but we’ve also made a lot of progress.

A lot of the issues that I’ve had with clutter is that when we moved in together, I had a very hard time integrating our stuff. At first, a lot of my stuff was in boxes in the garage because I moved into Mister’s one bedroom apartment, and I felt weird moving in and declaring all of his stuff as ours. Then, when we moved house, I finally got to open those boxes, but the storage situation in this house kind of sucks, and things just got shoved wherever they could be put away. Not the most effective solution. I still clung tightly to that “mine” and “yours” attitude regarding our stuff, and in some ways, I think Mister did too. Either way, we just dealt with a lot of stuff by not dealing with it.

Now we come to where we are packing to move cross country, and we have to decide if we really want to move this stuff. We’ve already made multiple trips to donation centers and thrown a lot of stuff away. We still have a ways to go, but this decluttering feels good.

We’ve also made decisions about some furniture. I brought into the household a bunch of modular cabinets. Some of them you’ve seen before (here and here), but they haven’t had a proper purpose since Mister and I moved in together. They’ve just been extra places to shove stuff. So, they go. We’ll have to find some more storage, but it will be more effective and something that we both like, since neither one of us is really fond of the blonde wood.

We also made the decision to get rid of our desks. Remember when I showed you my desk? Mister and I both have the same desk – a slick glass desk with an extra shelf on it. It’s never been my favorite, but Mister insisted that with two desks in a small room, glass would be better because it would visually open things up. It’s a great theory, until you start piling lots of crap on your desk. Then it doesn’t matter what it’s made out of, the room just ends up looking cluttered and small. So we talked about it, and rather than risk moving two glass desks that we’re not fond of, we’re going to do something like this:

Source: younghouselove.com via KirstenL4W on Pinterest

One long desk, and rather than the sweet $1 cabinets that John and Sherry used, we’ll use stair newel posts as supports, and use furniture we already have and love for storage underneath, like my aqua file cabinet and other small items like that. Then we won’t have our backs to each other, we’ll have a surface space that we can get better use out of, and we can use the wall behind us for bookshelves and have ourselves a proper looking office rather than a clutter cave.

So that’s where we’re at right now. Office and garage are partially decluttered, plans to declutter furniture right before we leave are in place, and we still have a ton of packing to do. I guess you all know what I’ll be doing for the next 6 weekends!