A clean office.

Believe it or not, I have a reputation for being extremely organized.  This is a picture of my office that I took about a year ago.  I have mentioned (a time or two) that I renovated my basement last September, and I now have renters.  My basement is around 1,300 square feet and part of that square footage was a really good size storage room.  However.  A downside of being a good organizer, is that I fit a LOT of stuff in that room. Now where was I supposed to put it all?  It was no easy task.

In fact, it is still a work in progress.  Somehow, even though I have sent car loads of stuff to the thrift store and given away tons of other stuff, and put some in a storage unit, and filled my third car bay in the garage with shelves of stuff ... one year later, I still have stuff that needs to find places to rest.

After my divorce, I put my house on the market. When it didn't sell,  I took that as a sign that maybe we were meant to stay put for awhile.

A couple of weeks ago I got a call out of the blue from a guy who goes to my church asking if I was still interested in selling my house.  We had held a church pot luck and outdoor movie in my back yard a few years ago and this particular couple loved the size of my back yard and wondered if I had any plans to move. (The wife had said to her husband, "I don't think she's selling her house Josh." Her husband's reply was, "Oh, everything's for sale.")

When I got the call from him, I answered, "I am always interested in selling my house."

"Great. We have family coming into town for Thanksgiving.  Can we come over and see it and take some pictures?"

Um, well?  Nothing like a home tour to get you motivated to clean up is there?!?!?  Although I still have corners of rooms that need attention (you know how that is), the office was the last remaining COMPLETE disaster of a room that finally had to be addressed.  It was one of those projects that was so overwhelming and daunting to me that it was just easier to close the door.  It became the new storage room, but it was anything but organized!  Frankly, I didn't even know where to begin.

(At one point during the course of the past year I did enlist the help of some rather large, rather heavy shelves from IKEA.  My brother helped me put them together and they do hold a lot of stuff .... I filled those puppies up in no time.)

Have you heard that saying, How do you eat an elephant?  And the answer is, One bite at a time?  This was my elephant, and my game plan was just to pick up one item at a time and decide what to do with it.

Several trash bags later ....

Ta Daaaaaaaa!!!!

You can see my carpet again!  Let the Harold Angels sing, ALLELUIA!!!

And while there is still some fine tuning left to be done on those shelves and in those baskets, almost every single item in that room was touched and analyzed.  It felt good.  And as an added bonus - I came across almost $500 worth of gift cards.  SWEET!  (Even better than finding a $20 in the pocket of your old jeans.)