pictureless desk

I didn't take any pictures but I took twenty minutes just and cleared a STACK of crap off my desk. I have organized things that need to be filed (I'll do that tonight) and have a decent size trash pile. I feel really good about this monday morning so far!


Where is everyone??? Come back! Post to us! Let's motivate each other. Remember it doesn't have to be huge massive projects. Just ten things. Walk around with a laundry basket and pick up ten things that need to GO or just sit in a "trouble spot" with a trash can at your feet!

Cheers!

Desk take 3

I spent about a half hour at the desk last night dealing with this stack on the top shelf. It was not something I'd planned to do yesterday but my husband needed to hook up our new-to-us (used) printer! So I needed to clear everything off for him to get to the old one and set up the new one. This one has a SCANNER feature, oh baby! I spent a lot of time going through the papers, deciding what was worth keeping or trashing. I ended up with a decent size trash pile. Among it all, I found missing CDs. Nice to know they aren't lost for ever. I added them to my binder promptly instead of setting them somewhere else to be forgotten. Overall, still a slight stack of things that just don't have a home elsewhere, but I'm really pleased with the results! Lots gone and what's there is stacked in categories instead of just being a heaping pile!

Before:

And after!

more desk

Well, here's my ten things for today. This is the top of the computer monitor. The bulk of this stack of cds there were a gift from Christmas. Most of them have been moved to my cd binder, but the stack remained.

Besides the empty cases that were trashed like 12 in all, there was an empty notepad, expired coupons, random stickers, wearable pins... Here's just the cases...

And ta-da! Here's what it looks like without the CRAP on top of it!

the two cards on the top are things I still need to put on the calendar (yah, right there on the wall) but um, you can only do so much before laziness sets in again.

desk papers

As many of you do, I can't stand the paper piles... our "office" desk is in the kitchen, so it's a eye-sore for sure. I have tackled some of it this morning. The rest will wait.

This is the desk (anyone see my printer under there?)

this is the pile of TRASH

This is what will be dealt with later.


And this is what's better:

Look, I can open my printer now! and what is that? I can get a tissue without having to first lift a pile out of the way! ... oy... This will be an ON GOING battle for me be/c it's right by the door we enter/exit the house and it's my dumping ground. It will be a mental challenge to keep this straightened, but maybe I can make a more honest attempt now, posting it on here.

This One's for Kate...

And everyone else who's gotten a little down on themselves for only getting rid of ten things and not tackling some big project.

I have no impressive update to post. No nifty pictures, just a small update on my office. I've spent the past few days grabbing a handful of papers from one of the piles in the office and sticking them in the appropriate file folder. I'm not even sorting them well within the file folders (cleaning out and organizing the filing cabinet will be another project). But this week I've been able to get an entire pile of papers put away -- only four to go! But seriously, if I'd told myself I needed to sit down and tackle the entire paper mess all at once, I never would have started and eventually would have given up on the office altogether because putting those papers away is a boring, sucky project. Taking the small step of a small stack everyday (it was more efficient to just grab some than to actually start counting documents) is getting the mess cleaned up!

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.

The Office of Shame

If you were to visit my house, you probably would have no idea that we have a clutter problem. Sure, there's a bit of stuff stored in the basement, but what are basements for? And it's not like you're going to dig through my closets or anything.

But if you happened to go down to the bathroom, you might notice The Door.



Since A and I moved into this house, no one but us has seen what is behind The Door. "Oh, that's the office, it's a little messy right now."

Hah. Let's see what's inside:


Not too bad, right?

Wrong.


If you look closely, you can see a coffee table under there.


That keyboard has not been played in nearly two years, because that's the last time I was able to get to it. It was lost after A went through a fit of "organizing," which really meant just pulling all of his stuff out of the boxes that had been stacked in the corner, and then leaving the boxes and the stuff all over the floor.

This corner actually isn't too bad. A year ago I decided to clean out the office, got the desk organized, and then lost motivation. A little clutter managed to accumulate before more stuff was piled just inside the door and we no longer could easily get to the desk, thereby discouraging anyone from actually using it.

At least two years worth of paperwork, possibly closer to three. It all gets piled just inside the door here because it's too much of a pain to get into the filing cabinet under the window seat due to all the junk in the way. Don't be fooled by what you see here. There are two more stacks blocked from view by the box, and the top of the cabinet on the left is covered with two more stacks.

Day One

Day One gives a pretty good sampling of the different clutter problems going on in this room.


First, we have the Outright Garbage That Was Never Thrown Away. I will take probable blame for the gift card holder from Expo Design Center (upper right) that I found on the coffee table but the rest is all A -- leftover packaging from a set of headphones, the shopping bag from the iPod he got me for my birthday two years ago, and random garbage from a photo frame from god knows when.


Here we have some But I May Use It Again" -- the bubbles for goody bags for E's first birthday. The whole box was something like $3, and the bottles were a pain to open. Is this really worth saving in case I want to use them for another set of goody bags a year or more in the future? And then there's the Forgotten Stuff -- the Next Day Blinds folder, full of information we gathered when we went to their showroom two years ago to get ideas. We did the blinds project six months later without even looking at the folder again because their products had changed, and the folder has lain forgotten on the table ever since.


"Where's Spot?" falls into the Forgotten Stuff category as well. E had ripped off one of the flaps, and I stuck it in the office to dry after gluing it back on. That was at least six months ago. The other two items are Sentimental Things That No One Actually Cares About. Someone gave A the joke daddy diaper changing kit after my baby shower. I doubt he even remembers it was down there, and I didn't ask him before I threw it out. If he someday asks what happened to it, I'm playing dumb. The slinky was a themed toy my old firm gave out after it was announced that we were merging with a larger law firm. It was a neat concept, but the new firm sucked and I quit after six weeks, so I really don't want to hold onto mementos of that event. Plus, there's at least one more of those slinkies somewhere in the office.


And then there are The Boxes. You may have noticed a few of these for various items in the pictures above. A refuses to throw out boxes for anything, because he swears it might be valuable later if it needs to be repaired or returned or resold. So I didn't throw this box out. I recycled it.

Again, if he ever asks, I'm playing dumb.

After Day One, I actually spent a few days doing random stuff in other parts of the house, because I was too depressed by how little difference I saw after one day. But eventually I came back.

Day Two

Lots of random stuff found on day two:


First, a product box I'm actually keeping (but found a home for other than the floor). My netbook has gone back in for service twice since we bought it back in December. It still has eight months left on the warranty and, if it keeps pace, will need to go back about four more times, so it makes sense to keep it. But the Target box next to it that has been used to ship the netbook back and forth to the manufacturer is going, because it's falling apart. If I have to buy a new shipping box later, so be it. Also going are a bunch of shoe boxes (I have no clue why these were in the office in the first place) and extra holiday cards from last year, including three partially addressed envelopes for people whose new addresses I didn't have. Because really, it's April. Those cards are never getting sent. And two package of thank you notes were put away. Thank you notes are whole other topic unto themselves. I'll save that exciting discussion for another day.


The rest of Day Two: extra outlet plugs that can be stored in the basement with the rest of the extra babyproofing stuff; the case for a set of headphones that went missing ages ago; a paddleball set I got as a thank you for donating blood (my first impulse was to store it in E's closet for when he's big enough to have fun with it, but really that's years away, I need to let it go), extra envelopes from E's birth announcements (sent 15 months ago), and Christmas wrapping paper that was on the floor behind the table. Really? We couldn't be bothered putting away the wrapping paper when we were done? The wrapping paper drawer is 18" from where we left it. Usually this is something that would probably be A's fault, but I don't think he did any of the Christmas wrapping this past year. I probably looked around the rest of the room, realized leaving five rolls of wrapping paper out would make no measurable difference, and left it there.


After Day Two I'd gained a whole extra foot you could step inside the door, so I've got that going for me.