Visual Clutter

Something I love is a space with minimal amounts of visual clutter.  I am most at peace in my own head when my eyes have a place to rest and I can look around without being visually overstimulated.  Lately I have been trying to reduce the visual clutter around our own home.  

A good example of reducing visual clutter is this before and after pantry photo:

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When you look at storage spaces with minimal visual clutter, you'll find a lot of matching bins, jars, containers, etc.  Most people will transfer products from their original packaging to a matching set of visually appealing receptacles.  This kind of uniformity just feels good to look at.  While spaces with doors are not my personal top priority, I still enjoy looking at spaces that are organized in this way.

When trying to find a place to start in our home, I decided to begin with a spot that I clear off and "hide" what's on it whenever we were expecting company.  We use essential oils for a lot of things (David gave me the doTerra home physician kit for Christmas) so we like to keep them in an easily accessible spot.  Over time they ended up being tossed into a plastic green bowl and put on the shelf above my desk in the kitchen.  This is the room where I spend most of my time and it's one of the first things you see when you walk in our main entryway.  After I hid the bowl and box of oils for the 3rd time when expecting company, I decided to take the hint.  Something needed to change.  Why should we live with decor, or the lack thereof, that we wouldn't want guests to see?  We are the ones living here and are the ones who should enjoy our home the most!  So while I was out today, I kept my eye out for an alternative that would be a little more visually appealing:

Of course I didn't think to take before pictures but this little caddy is SO much cuter than the green plastic bowl!  The best part is that now when we are preparing to have people over, we have one less thing to hide.  Haha!  I just wrote on the little chalkboard label with a chalk pen that I already had and also labeled the tops of the oils so we could find what we were looking for at a glance.  The space still needs a little work but it doesn't make me cringe so that's a start!  Now if I could just keep the desk itself clean... Talk about some visual clutter!  That surface has become a hot spot for sure.  What can I say?  I am a work in progress.

What do you have to hide every time company comes over?  I think we probably all have something!

~Sarah

Flashback!  Here's what we were up to one year ago today: "Secret Excitement"

And two years ago today: "Belly Laughs"

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