Getting Organized

By nature, I'm a pretty organized person. I like things to be clean, to be tidy, to be in order.

But when life gets hectic, organization is often one of the first things to go out the window, along with healthy eating and working out.

Once I finished with classes last semester and had winter break stretching out before me (well, most of it, sans 10 days of travel), I decided to tackle some of the areas of the house that had gotten a bit out of control.

Warning: The images you see may shock you. Please do not think less of me. Instead, I hope you will be impressed with my willingness to share such sordid details with you, dear readers.

I started in the office, where I spend so much of my time, and where most of the disarray was centered.


Magazines and books were scattered everywhere. Mail littered the floor.


Christmas gifts I needed to mail covered the guest bed. In general, it was a disaster area. And don't even get me started on my closet.


You see, Conservative Hubby and I each have a nice-size closet in our bedroom, and then we each have another one in the office/guest room. His bedroom closet is filled with suits, dress shirts, and sweaters; his entire office closet is devoted to golf shirts. Seriously. I don't even want to know how many of them he owns.

My bedroom closet is devoted to clothes too, whereas my office closet corrals a random assortment of items—workout clothes, spare sheets, purses, scarves, wrapping supplies, and boxes, boxes, boxes.

As I believe I've mentioned before, I have a problem with saving items. I'm not a hoarder of the magnitude you see on TV, the sort who can't throw away anything even when junk is spilling out of the windows. But I can't ever seem to justify getting rid of perfectly good boxes, tissue paper, ribbons, and gift bags. That's why my closet looked like it did.

Once I started organizing, I decided to recycle stack after stack of magazines I was holding onto for no discernible reason (as a magazine person, it's my nature). There are still a lot of magazines left, mind you. But it's better.


I also organized all my books as best I could, put away stationery and filed bills, and found a new home for all my school bags and purses.


Then I whipped the closet into shape by weeding out boxes and bringing in some drawers to create a gift-wrapping station.


Ah, so much better.


Over the break I also organized the bathroom closet, the hallway closet, and the laundry room, which was overrun with boxes dating all the way back to when we moved into our house. It was difficult, but I decided to save only really sturdy boxes that are a good size for shipping. The rest I hauled to a recycling place in Bloomington, as L-Town is sorely lacking in recycling facilities beyond the most basic.

Conservative Hubby's Jeep was so full on my recycling mission that I couldn't have taken a passenger along with me. I couldn't see out of the windows. And I had to leave some boxes behind for a second trip. I'm not even kidding.

I've also been working on organizing the cupboards in our kitchen, although that is still a work in progress. I turned a tall cupboard that had been full of junk and miscellaneous dog items into a pantry, have started a pile of items to donate to Mission Mart, and have been moving things around to make space for a few lovely new pots and pans, small kitchen appliances, and (of course) some terrific new pieces of Pyrex.

I think I've made a pretty darn good start. But, as I learned after writing an organization story and copy editing a magazine on the topic recently, when it comes to organization, the work is never done.