December tiny projects challenge: Day 4

17 December 2021

Today’s tiny project was the organizer on the desk in my home that I call the household desk. My husband and I each have home offices with desks, but this desk is in a central room in our living space and stuff definitely tends to accumulate there. This teak organizer is a clutter magnet (as such organizers often are).

So I decided to declutter and organize this little space, which I probably haven’t been done in a few years.

Here’s the before shot (please don’t judge):

I started with the top shelf on the left of the organizer and just worked my way through. I went through each shelf, slot and drawer, editing as much as possible. I threw away a number of old items (like business cards for contractors we didn’t choose and expired Airborne gummies). I relocated a number of things to my office, which helped a lot.

Here’s the after shot:

Probably the most helpful thing I thought of was to move the face masks that I would just toss on the organizer to a doorknob. There’s a door just to the left of the desk that opens in and almost always remains open. So I hung the masks by their earloops on the inside doorknob, where they’re accessible but unobtrusive. And since I’ll surely go to the desk for a mask, they will be nearby when I don’t find them where I’m looking for them.

Here are some of the other things I did that were easy to do and so effective in cleaning up this space:

I moved the blood pressure cuff to my office, where I’m more likely to remember to use it.
I put Bix’s clickers for dog training in a little felted wool bowl I’d knitted
I tested all the pens and removed most of them, so I would have easier access to pens when I needed them. (The pen holder was too full!) And I used a glass I was going to donate as a pen holder rather than the less attractive red one I’d bought in the 90s.
I moved one of my action figures (Robert Mueller) to my husband’s office, because there was obviously one too many action figures in that space.
I gathered up my inordinately large collection of wristlets and wallets (from a ceaseless quest for a solution to carrying around my money) and moved them to a different space downstairs. I’ll probably donate a lot of them. (By the way, I found a wallet/small purse solution, which I’ll share in a future post.)
Best of all, I got rid of the expired Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons, since they no longer accept expired coupons.

This one took longer than I expected—probably 40 minutes. But they were very pleasant minutes and I’m enjoying the results!

Tagged with: decluttering, desk, tiny projects