Simplify

That is my current motto. Simplify. While I am trying to keep this in mind with how I spend my time - my main focus at the moment is on "stuff". All of the crap sitting around our house that we don't really need. We started purging a couple of years ago and each time we get rid of a big batch of stuff our house feels so much lighter that it makes us want to get rid of even more! I swear, it is like a freaking clown car or Mary Poppins' bag. We keep finding more and more crap that we don't really need and it makes me wonder how we ever crammed all of it in to begin with.

Lately we have been talking about building a small house in the country and by small I mean that my latest sketches are less than 500 sq ft. Not only will a house this size be cheaper to build and maintain, it will also force us to evaluate our belongings and determine what we really need because there just isn't a bunch of extra space to store the useless junk. We aren't getting rid of everything that would be considered "unnecessary" we are just going through all of our stuff with a more critical eye than before and only keeping the things that we really enjoy or that are used frequently enough to justify the amount of space that they occupy.

If you have spent much time around here, there is one area affected by the purge that may come as a shock: 

Halloween Decor. 

That's right. We are getting rid of it. All of it. I started thinking about this after last Halloween. We had a really small turnout for our party and we decided that in the future it would be more fun to just have a scary movie night or carve pumpkins instead of putting together elaborate prop displays and a big food spread.

So when we got to the Halloween decorations during our purge, we decided that it was time to enter a new phase in our Halloween celebrations. I still love Halloween and plan to craft and party, it will just be done in a different way. It will be more about pimping out our car for trunk or treat, making costumes, having a low-key movie night with a few creepy food items, and maybe throwing a cute monster party like this one for Jer and his friends. I will probably also make some vintage-style paper decorations that are really inexpensive to make and are small enough to be tucked away in a file folder. I will also continue making elaborate props but when I am finished they will head to my Etsy Shop instead of sticking around my house.

Which brings me to the part that might make the Halloween-lovers out there really happy - over the next couple of weeks all of our small(ish) Halloween props will be showing up in the Shop! I have already added a few and there are bunch more still to come. So if there are any of my props that you have been envious of, keep an eye out over there because it just might pop up for sale! I won't be holding items for anyone but if there is a specific item that you are interested in, you can shoot me an email to ask if that will be one of the items up for sale or if you want to request an email notification when the listing for that item is live.

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