Peace of Mind Organizing

Weekend update

2 June 2008

On Friday I blogged about how I hoped to focus on decluttering in the coming weekend and that I was experiencing the rare and delightful confluence of having time for this kind of work and feeling motivated to do it.

I have to say, it went well. In Friday’s post, I listed the projects I hoped to accomplish:

• Move my yarn and knitting supplies from an upstairs room to a downstairs room

• Create room in an adjunct closet for overflow clothes

• Move a category of clothes to the adjunct closet

• Move some out-of-season clothes to a spare downstairs closet

• Reorganize my lingerie drawer (perhaps the most exciting project!)

• Sort, weed and reorganize my jewelry

• Clean up the floor of my office

The only one I didn’t fully accomplish was the first, and that was a conscious decision to wait until I’d purchased the new storage solutions for the yarn, which I’m going to wait to do after I paint the downstairs room. (I’m going to buy Elfa drawers.)

It did take me until this morning to finish clearing the floor of my office, but otherwise everything was done this weekend. In addition, I created new action file cart for under my desk. I’d been using the same one for literally 15 years. I bought a shiny new white Elfa file cart like this one:

The one I bought is letter, not legal size.

I bought it at the Container Store on Friday (I’m taking full advantage of the discount they’re now offering NAPO members!) and put it together Saturday. My old one had rather ugly mismatched files. For my new cart I’m using fancy white files from “MO by Smead and some pretty Russell+Hazel Kit interior folders. (I can’t seem to find an image of those online, but they were half price at Office Max!) The new file drawer is much deeper, so my client files and Quickbooks files came out of file boxes under the other part of my desk and are now in my file drawer. It’s wonderful!

The most exciting organizing project was indeed reorganizing my lingerie drawer. It took no more than 10 minutes, but it was an amazing transformation. I’d post pictures, but somehow it doesn’t seem appropriate to show the blogosphere my underwear drawer. I will say that these are the drawer organizers I bought from the Container Store. Love ‘em!

These silk drawer organizers whipped my underwear drawer into shape!

Overall, I wasn’t quite as focused this weekend as I’d hoped, but I did enjoy the work. I allowed myself to be inefficient and messy as I did it, which was kind of freeing. When I’m working with clients I try hard to be efficient, since they’re paying for my time. In my home this weekend, I took a lot of breaks and really allowed stuff to sprawl for awhile.

I’m by no means finished with the organizing in my home (my bathroom closets are calling to me, among other things), and I’m heartened that I made the progress I did while having fun and not stressing out.

Tagged with: accountability, decluttering, disorder, storage

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