Organized Home

I would like to share my recent organizing adventures. Some may find them boring, but I know that at least my sister and I find it exhilirating to get rid of old things and make room for new! :)

The first item in my condo I tackled was my bookshelf. It was getting out of hand. Books were piled on top of other books, and the order was just getting destroyed. Here is the "before" picture I took for posterity:



I got rid of about a box and a half of books, between things I admitted to myself that I'd never read, things that I'd already read and didn't want to re-read, and general textbooks that I wouldn't ever need again (Intro to Linguistics? History of Rock & Roll?). I gave my friend Randy the books, since he sells books for a living on Amazon.com. He says he gave me "the gift of space". :) Anyway, here is the bookshelf, after the transformation:

Look at how everything's leaning in order to stay upright! Yeah!

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My next area to tackle were the "cubey" cabinets on either side of my bed. (This is really sad, but I just looked, and discovered that 5 out of 7 plastic storage boxes I have are full of either yarn or spinning fiber..) Nonetheless. I concentrated on cleaning out boxes of magazine clippings I'd been collecting for over a decade. (I sound so old!) I did a "random search and destroy" with the clippings - I randomly rifled through each box containing magazine clippings. If something I touched caught my interest, I kept it. If it didn't, out it went to the recycling bin. I did save the lists of stores in different cities, however. Anyway, I managed to get rid of a whole shelf and a half of clippings, which makes a big difference to me in a space as small as this! See the beauty below:

The last area I approached was the corner where my old TV used to be. I used to have a cabinet over in the corner, inside of which I hid my technology (laptop, DVD player, printer/ scanner / fax machine, computer CDs, and wireless modem). Since I bought the new TV, I got rid of the old TV and the cabinet, and now had an entirely new problem: the box the TV came in. I don't want to get rid of it, because it will be very helpful the day I want to move into a bigger place - styrofoam packaging made for a specific product is pretty hard to improve upon in terms of secure packing of the original item. Anyway, I managed to fit the few pieces of framed art I wanted to keep into the TV box, and put it in the corner, behind my inflatable kayak, and next to my printer and some other miscellaneous stuff:

The final love will hopefully be happening this weekend. I received a wall mount for my new TV in the mail recently. I haven't opened it yet to check it out, but I should do so today. I want to invite my friends Adam and Liz over for an evening, so Adam can help Daniel install the TV mount, and I figure I can make dinner, or at least snacks and then take everyone out to dinner. Anyway, once that is done, I will be so happy, because I will not only have my other "side chair" back, but I will have the TV off the floor and out of the way.