Taking Out The Trash

Well, more like taking out the clutter. It never fails to surprise and disgust me to see how much clutter accumulates in our office. It doesn't help that I'm obsessive about my hatred for clutter and my husband tends to collect things crap we don't need. Okay, sometimes he has really cool collections, like his movies and his steins from Germany. But the other stuff...

Ready for the befores? God, they're ugly.









...

I have no explanation. Some of the wayward books and papers are a result of the massive and frequent earthquakes. But definitely not the whole room. And it had a semblance of order when we unpacked everything, I think. I don't know what happened, but somehow the room exploded.

I couldn't even walk in there without grimacing. Yuck.

So I stocked up on supplies:



Bouncy music and water. And got to cleaning.

I didn't take pictures of the whole process because I did one chunk in one day, then finished a week or two later. But the process went a little like this: Pile everything to one side of the room so I had some space to work with. Empty the bookshelves completely. Sort the books. (Jeff and I had a big disagreement about book organization, so to save constant bickering we divided our books. I organize mine alphabetically, aka normally, and he does...something else. I don't even know or understand, but his books have their own space now.) I also separated textbooks I don't care for, like Science and Math. Then piled all of my literature anthologies together, because I do care for those. And I'm known to flip through them now and then, so I like to keep them handy. I also separated my dad's books, which I've been meaning to mail back to him for about...a year. I should've done it when the distance, and price, was much cheaper in CA!



After I sorted, I threw them back up onto the bookshelves and out of the way. Then I started digging through the piles of junk. I separated all the military paperwork that was overtaking the piles and left them neatly in a box for my husband to go through and decide what's worth keeping. I never shred military stuff without his permission. But the rest of the stuff was free reign. So I shredded bills, credit card offers, and all the other useless junk we had laying around. I shredded so much I broke my shredder. Or jammed it trying to shove too much into it in my haste to clear the clutter. Either way, it's dead. I also threw out all the things we didn't care about. My theory: if we didn't use it in Lemoore and haven't unpacked it or missed it here---we don't need it. Period. Unless they're collectibles we have no place for (like my husband's chess sets), there's no need for extra stuff. Then I tried to organize the rest into like groupings and hid them away in bins, baskets, and crates. Military pins and patches, office supplies, thank you cards and other mail-related things, old pictures, etc. etc. It was a mess for a while there, but it's looking up now.

Would you like to see how much better it looks after a couple trips to the recycling and garbage bins?





Oh my goodness, I can breathe when I walk in this room now. Not that I need to walk in there too much. Besides grabbing a book or pen, this room has become Jeff's pseudo-man cave. I say pseudo because his dream man cave needs a lot more space and a lot more distance from me and my obsession with cleaning and clutter-eliminating. But since I don't need a desk or quiet space for my degree at the moment, I don't need an office. So it's his. Sort of, minus the books and girly stuff that will surely get sprinkled around.



It's amazing how much brighter the room looks when the eye isn't distracted by clutter. When I walk in, my eye immediately goes to the large window now. And this is the smallest amount of window space in a room! We lucked into some massive glass viewing space in this apartment, and I LOVE it. And I love that that gorgeous window can be appreciated now.



There are still some kinks to work out. The room is being threatened by chord chaos, but there's only so much we can do about that. With a desktop, external hard drive, router, and wireless router all trying to co-exist, it's a little challenging to hide the wires. We also have a desk chair in pieces. We go back and forth on whether to just put it together or to put it in our storage cage, but we have yet to do either. And my husband has that pile of papers to look through. But since I cleared a ton of space, I'm not in a rush.



I am wondering how long it will take us to stuff these bookshelves though. In Lemoore, we had one bookshelf jam-packed with books and files and who knows what else. We bought another shelf and assembled it once we unpacked here, but it's not looking so empty either. I'm just hoping we can last until we go back to the states and can buy another matching wire shelf from Wal*mart!


So that's our office, minus a few dozen pounds of clutter. So much better, right? Now if I can keep it that way. If not, Jeff just needs to keep the door closed at.all.times. I told him that was a must for his man cave. I've got command strips coming in the mail, so I may be adding a few touches to the walls here and there. I still love my wall collage in the living room, but the rest of the walls are looking pale in comparison...stay tuned!