The Office of Shame (Update) or How I Neglected My Son All of Monday

I woke up on Monday feeling super-motivated, so I decided to tackle a slightly bigger project in the office. Our 5th wedding anniversary is coming up next month, and I really wanted to have all of our wedding photos fully sorted and put into albums so I could be well and truly done with the project. We finally did our formal album six months ago, but that still left us with 470 photos to be put into albums or thrown out, and two 200-photo albums to sort them into.

But that wasn't the end of the project, because once this was done, I needed a place in the office to store the photos. And as you saw from the "before" photos, there wasn't a free shelf to put them on. So I needed to make space on this bookshelf:


I started by putting all of A's camera gear on the bottom shelf away so I wouldn't accidentally drop anything on it. I'm not going to pretend I sorted this all away in an organized fashion, because I don't know how A wants it sorted and the camera gear wasn't the focus today. I just found space in the drawers below and put it in, and I'll tackle those drawers another day.

Then I moved on to the books. Most of those are A's and my law school texts and other legal references, and there are also a handful of A's college texts. I don't know why he was so determined to display them all in the office, maybe he wanted it to look like some kind of law library, but as you can see, it just looks like a mess.

There are a few texts/reference books there that arguable should stay readily available -- A does IP litigation, so everything IP or litigation-related I could understand the reasoning for keeping them here. But really, neither of practices criminal law, so we didn't need one, let alone two, copies of Bonnie, Coughlin, Jeffries and Low's Criminal Law. So all of those textbooks got packed away into boxes, which conveniently also freed up some floor space in the office previously occupied by said boxes. In all, I boxed up and labeled 32 textbooks to be stored in the basement (probably will eventually be moved to the attic, but I can't lift those boxes into the attic by myself).


See how nicely each box is labeled with all the books inside? Now A can't complain that he can't find what he needs (even though he'll never need it) because everything is packed up. Confession, though -- I did leave about 12 more texts on the office floor because I ran out of good storage boxes. I'll have to ask A to steal a couple from work when he's back in town.

Once that was all done, I spent the rest of the day sorting out all the wedding photos and then putting everything back onto the shelf, which now looks like this:


I still have a lot more photos to sort and print, so eventually that bottom shelf will be filled with more albums. Oh yeah, I also put some of our wedding photos in frames and displayed them around the house yesterday, so that's the picture on the second shelf. And when I eventually get to really decorating this room, I want to find some cool bookends for the shelf with the reference books on it.

If you were looking at the photo closely, you may have noticed a wooden hippo. As I go through the rest of this room, you may notice more wooden animals. This falls into a category of clutter that I still don't know how to deal with, other than to accept, called Crap My Father-in-Law Got Scammed On and Now Passes Along to Us.

Finally, just to show off how much progress I'm making with the rest of the room, here's how the floor space looked after yesterday with all of the storage boxes gone, photo-related stuff cleaned up, and a few pieces of random garbage thrown away:


Notice how there are legitimate walkways to all parts of the room now?

I think the next few days are going to be strict 10-item days, because I'm a little worn out after all this and I don't want to burn myself out.