Organizing the clutter of our hobbies

In our household art supplies are abundant.  My husband paints miniatures for gaming (check out his blog)  and I try different things for a while, until the next interest comes along. Between my husband and I we have more art supplies than the average preschool.  Because of our different interests, we hoard a variety of empty containers, wires, bits and pieces of you name it, "just in case".  Can you say pack rat??

My latest hobby has been fun; I've been beading for a bout a year.  I mostly make jewelry for gifts, and can honestly say I have only kept few pieces for myself. 

My mother (a true merchant) keeps trying to encourage me to sell my jewelery, but I bead for fun; HAVING TO make jewelry for profit would become a chore and no longer fun.  I don't think I could do it anyway, I have a short attention span and usually end up putting things away for a month or two (or more) and come back to them when I have nothing better to entertain me. 

I did just that with hand-painting flower pots.  My husband is my witness that I haven't painted anything in over a year (may be more -- no concept of time) and I still owe him a pot for "Robert," an ivy he's had since before we met!

This year I have told myself we need to purge our home of some of the clutter.  We need to stop accumulating and start disposing of things. I hate to say it, but I am the adult when it comes to these types of chores.  It has been difficult taking on this role in our marriage!  All my adult life I did as I saw was needed and the only obstacle was my procrastination.  Now I have to negotiate with my husband and be patient of his explanations of why we must hold on to something.  I've resorted to the logical argument of not being his parent and not wanting to be the "police" in our home, but it's very hard when your first impulse is to save things. 

There has been one wonderful thing that has helped keep order in the house and the pack rat tendencies at bay.  Since we moved out of our apartment in to an actual house we have a weekly recycling service and a huge bin that gets picked up like the trash does in our neighborhood. It is much easier to rid of things once we can agree we have too many "just in case" items.  Our old apartment didn't have recycling on site and it was a pain in the ass to recycle since we had to drive out our recyclables to the nearest drop off site.  If we saved something, getting rid of it was nearly impossible!

Anyways, I foresee the need of more de-cluttering and storage solutions. My mom and siblings gifted me a brand new sewing machine that I haven't even gotten out of the box.  I am afraid once it's out it will reside on our kitchen table (our craft area) for weeks at a time.  I've already been looking for material to sew aprons for Mother's Day gifts and I know once I get started the project will take up much of the nonexistent free time I have during the week (most of it is spent commuting to and from work).

Even with our decent sized "catch-all room" (office/honey's gaming storage/drum room), there is no space for my sewing machine in there.  We seriously need to work on moving some of those things into the garage, but that would entail cleaning it out and going thru all the boxes we have yet to touch since our move a couple of years ago. 

We are in desperate need of motivation or an adult to come and force us to get the job done!