Changing How We Live

A few weeks ago I hit a wall. I was tired and exhausted of being tired and exhausted. I was over paying bills, grocery shopping, cleaning, organizing, going to work, walking the dogs, folding clothes, washing dishes, etc. Basically, I was tired of our day to day grind and I needed a mental vacation. So, I did just that - except I still went to work. I took some time to step back and look at our over all picture and I realized one huge thing. The fault was me and me alone. I put to much pressure on myself. I don't let my husband help enough, even though he offers. For some reason I think I need to do it all. Correction, I'm slightly OCD controlling and he doesn't do things the way I do them so I automatically think it's wrong. So, basically I was making myself exhausted for no reason.

After a week of my mental vacation, I realized I'm so stressed and exhausted because we have become completely unorganized this year. We have become lazy. After several long conversations with the Mr. we've decided the make the following changes:



1. We both want to lose some weight. Mostly because we both have gained weight since being married and neither one of us are happy about it. We don't eat horrible as it is but a little exercise and some food changes wouldn't kill us. I would love to lose about 40lbs. Earlier this year I was focused and I lost 30lbs, sadly I've gained about 10lbs back with all the stress I've put on myself. At the beginning of the year I hoped to be at my goal weight by our anniversary (October 3rd), I don't think this is a realistic goal as of today so I am getting rid of the deadline. I am just going to focus on the change. That means back to menu planning, trying new recipes so we don't get tired of the same stuff, and starting an exercise program.

2. I've realized Pinterest/Blogs will be the death of me if I let it. I found myself comparing our house to others. But, my house is mine and I love it. Sure, it has taken us forever to chose a paint color, pick our furniture, figure out how to use a room, etc. But, we are on our own time and I am OK with that. We have a extra long wish list for this house and I'm finally OK that it may stay long for awhile. We are working with a real budget and we want to make the house fit us. So, I am going to stop stressing over all the projects we have ahead of us and just focus on one at a time. The rest will fall into place.

3. The main source of my stress: paper clutter. Since buying our house and the hubs getting out of the military I swear the paper in our house has tripled. Our mortgage documents alone are a few inches thick and Brian's VA documents take up a filing cabinet on there own. I need a better paper storage/filing system. This is a priority for me because I can't handle not knowing where something is or having to dig through a huge stack of paper for one phone number. I am working on this change as we speak and will be posting about it tomorrow.

4. We need to enjoy more time together. We have been married for almost seven years and we have only had one real vacation that didn't involve going to another state to visit family. We blame this mostly on the military. When you live away from family most of your days off are spent going to visit them. Since the Mr is no longer in the service we need to focus on us. We can't always be the ones traveling to go see family and friends, we have to learn to say no. We need more vacations, day trips and date nights to make our own memories.

5. We blow our budget every month but neither one of us could tell you on what. We need to get real about paying down our debt and finding a spending plan that fits our needs. Once we figure out our spending plan we need to actually stick to it. For some reason this is harder for us than anything! Have you noticed I haven't posted about $60 grocery challenge in a while, yeah we need to get back to that or increase it to fit our needs. We need to eat out less (the weekends get us every time), we need to get in a habit of packing our lunches every day again, we need to cut back come of our bills (mostly our cell phone bill - that is one bill I complain about every month).

I'm slowly working on these changes in our household, hitting the paper clutter head on first! My first project is creating a Home Management Binder that works for us. I've been looking all over the internet for inspiration the past few days/weeks and I'm in the process of creating forms that work for us. I hope you stop back by tomorrow to check out the first step!

Have you decided to make changes in your life/house lately? Have you ever hit a wall and needed a mental break or vacation from the daily grind? What helped you get through it and get back on track?