It's really hard to work when your workspace perpetually looks as though a tornado just ripped through the room. At least, that's how I feel. This past weekend turned into an impromptu adventure in re-designing my entire office! Did I know it when the weekend began? Nope! But hey, sometimes you just can't fight the urge to organize.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, I turned into a neat-freak. I have no idea where it came from, because as a child, I was forever being sent to my room to clean it. Oh, how I hated cleaning. I think the turning point came the winter (in Pennsylvania) that we had a leak in our roof, and my closet literally overflowed. I recall my father tossing things out of my closet to reach the attic crawlspace that would allow him access to the area with the leak. The task of putting that closet back together forever changed how I decided what to keep and what to toss.
Anyways, I still have a tendency to pull things out and forget to put them away, foolishly believing that I'll be using them again in the very near future. That is almost always not true. Saturday morning, my husband was in the office surfing the web on his computer. I wandered in to look at the state of disarray on my work desk. I cringed. After looking around the room a few times and feeling somewhat helpless, I realized that something was going to have to change. My part of the office (which is about 3/4 of it) looked like my childhood bedroom! Supplies everywhere, tools everywhere, and because of the mess, very little room to work. No wonder I've been using my dining room table!
Here's what my work bench looked like a couple of weeks ago:
So, I started thinking about how to fix the problem. After a lot of thinking, some planning, and a trip to the local Ikea, the room began to come into focus. As you can gather from the few photos near the beginning of this post, my office is much more organized now. And here's a few more shots, just for fun:
Needless to say, I hope that I will be spending much more time using my now far more extended workspace!
