Reassure Me I'm Being Reasonable (Or Tell Me If I'm Not)

This is our front hall closet:


It is completely full to the gills. I have some jackets in there, but the majority of the stuff in here is A's. More than half the coat space is his stuff (most winter stuff that is out of season), the stuff on the floor is all his shoes (plus the dustbuster), the stuff on the top shelf is some shopping bags, duffel bags, and other random stuff.

All I want from this closet is to be able to hang a few guests' coats here rather than putting them upstairs in the guest bedroom, and to be able to put the vacuum in here. Right now the vacuum lives down two flights of stairs (we have a split level), and it's incredibly heavy, so the main level doesn't get vacuumed as often as I would like because it's so much effort to get the vacuum up and down the stairs. I'm sick of it.

A refuses to move any coats (or his sports jerseys, he has almost a dozen and they all live in this closet). He keeps all of his shoes here instead of in the closet upstairs (and he has the better closet). He refuses to move the duffel bags down to the basement for storage, even though we only use them every few months.

I am fed up, and I think I'm putting my foot down.

We have a half-empty cedar closet in the basement that has more than enough room for all of his coats and jackets. If he picked out just four that he wanted to keep upstairs for the season (with the rest all still readily available), that seems like it should be enough. I have a couple, E has a couple, we still have half a closet for guests. His sports jerseys should live in his closet, not this one. Same goes for his shoes (especially since mine have to all live in my closet). There is no reason the duffel bags need to be up here. I want room for my effing vacuum, and I don't think that's too much to ask!

A is going to fight me on this one, I know it, and it's going to be a battle. So if you think I'm being unreasonable, or if you see some other solution, please tell me. He doesn't get back from Taiwan until next Thursday, so I have time to consider this.

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.