Taking Over the World, Part I

Our computer room serves too many purposes. Over half of it houses my stamping stuff. When I was teaching, it served as my office. It also held all of my jewelry stuff when I was selling jewelry. So it's been an office/business/stamping room for quite a while, even though I haven't taught in two years and quit selling jewelry a year ago. And it's not a large room by any means. The amount of stuff we (um, okay, I) have stuffed in here is unreal. Cleaning and reorganizing this room has been on my "to do" list forever, but it's such a HUGE and daunting task that I've been avoiding it like the plague.

I keep threatening to move the PC into the guest room and take over this room as a stamping/craft room. He claims I'm taking over the house. The house? No. I'm aiming big - I'm taking over the world!

Yesterday I was inspired by this post at Mabel's House to get my act together and get busy. I decided to just start with the PC desk. Good thing I did - it took most of the day!

Before (on the left) and After (on the right)....












So what, praytell, is the big difference? I ended up with one very full trash bag, and in addition to that....


I cleaned out all but 3 "techy" books. I decided to keep my HTML books, but the rest are going to the library for the annual book sale. There are four more books to add to this pile - large, spiral bound books on Office XP.







Then I went through all the binders that have been sitting on the bottom shelf for years. I tossed the papers inside, and the binders were donated to the local school district. I also tossed my lecture notes (yes, I have a them on CD if I ever need them). And went through the "scratch paper" stack and tossed everything that had already been "scratched." This is the stack of paper that is headed for the recycle bin. Just a little bit, huh?






And then there was this pile of stuff that doesn't even belong in this room! Most of it is from the desktop itself. One of the reasons we bought our PC desk is because it has a large flat surface for writing. Or in our case, collecting stuff! I swear the PC desk is a junk/stuff magnet. Everything that enters this room lands on the desk and then gets shuffled off to the side and eventually buried under other stuff.



What did I do with all of the empty space? Well, I relocated a paper sorter tray thingy to the desk to hold scratch paper (what's left of it) and other items in a (hopefully) more organized fashion. I moved my stamping catalogs to one of the bottom shelves so they are right at my fingertips and all in one location. And the very bottom shelf now holds some items that have been shuffled around while waiting to be altered/embellished. And I straightened and re-alphabetized my chick flick collection.

I must clean the rest of the house today, but if I have any energy left after that I'll come back and tackle another part of this mess. My goal is for it to be only stamping/crafting stuff except for the PC and filing cabinet. No more techy stuff. No more teaching stuff. No more jewelry stuff. Just stamping.

Look out, Honey, the garage is next!!!!!!!