Tackling “The List” & Tales of Household Organization

Around here it’s well known that the hubby feels his “Honey-Do” list never ending. Of course, he’d be right about that. The mile-long list of home improvement projects, or let’s call it what it really is; “Crap we have to do to keep the house from falling apart” is something that a lot of households get overwhelmed by. Of course, it’s not just actual house fixes, a lot of it is organization. As you may recall in another life, pre-baby (well, pre-baby 2, post baby 1) I had an organizing business. I’ve said many times, including in this blog, that staying organized is something I still struggle with as it’s a constant work in progress. I certainly know how to get organized and can come up with any number of creative ideas for organized living, but it is definitely work. Things tend to creep up on you when you’re not paying attention.

Take our office for example. Since we don’t really use it much as an office any longer we inadvertently ended up with one of those “catch all” rooms. First, it was shoving in the play kitchen that although little guy still plays with, there are times we’d like it out of the middle of our family room, such as for my recent birthday celebration. Then there are the things we are actually trying to get rid of via eBay; the irony here is that even when de-cluttering you can actually end up with more of a mess while attempting to eliminate stuff! Between all that and several vintage items from our Etsy shop mingled with a few works in project the office was becoming a disaster. And just because I love my readers and am not afraid to “put it all out there” I’m actually showing you a picture of this mess! 
 
So, we decided to get serious about this and spent last weekend working on it. Here’s what we did; we started with the ol’ pull everything out maneuver (which meant our entire front room was covered in stuff!) and after working all day Saturday, we ended up with one huge bag of trash, several things to eliminate and along the way discovered a surprise solution that solved two dilemmas at once! As readers may recall, we redecorated our home and sold many of our antiques. We successfully sold all the large pieces but one, our French armoire. Once everything was re-decorated and furnished it became the elephant in the room because it no longer fit anywhere. After months of having it block the double doors to the office (there’s another door around the back side of the room) the hubby realized that since we couldn’t seem to sell it and we didn’t want it sitting in the living room any longer that it would be perfect for storage of “projects in process” in the office! He was right, it’s the perfect solution and it’s already outfitted with three shelves. We managed to get it in the office after some partial disassembly and reassembly and its now acting as a very fancy storage solution!
   
Of course, the overall moral of the story here is “never let it pile-up”. Ha! This was definitely an eye-opening lesson in realizing how bad things can get when you let them go vs. how much easier it is to manage to when you have systems in place and do the maintenance to keep things up little by little.

And in closing, I thought I’d share with you this accidentally hilarious photo I took while the hubby was painting.

The explanation here is that he is painting our new family room wall, a room which was previously used as our dining room that had large iron wall art that held wine bottles. When he removed the iron pieces he set all the empty wine bottles on the table, making it look as though he’d been throwing back a few while on the job!