Operation Organize Computer Room

As I kind of figured, operation organize computer room in 1 week was a complete bust! Holy Macaroni there is sooooo much crap in here!! One day this room will be beautiful but it became readily apparent that this is not the kind of clutter one can simply clean up in a week. I did a few small things before getting stuck on a large task I wasn’t anticipating.

Apparently after my promise to take lots of before and after photos I didn’t take any…..I will get better at this blogging thing I promise.

For the “little tasks” I:

• Cleaned up the area around the chameleons cage. It was covered with cleaning supplies, his spray bottle (to mist the leaves etc.) and lots of little plastic bags that his crickets come in. I also moved his cage over so that there would be room for a garbage can beside it to collect both the waste associated with the chameleon and the rest of the garbage that seems to love accumulating in this room.
• Cleaned up some of the clothes that had been left behind in here. I have an awful habit, especially when I am studying late at night to get really cold so I throw on a big hoodie, then I get a big hot chocolate and as I’m drinking it I get really hot so I take off the hoodie and my socks and then I leave them here. I found a few sweaters I thought had been lost forever! The clothes have been moved to the laundry room.
• I also vacuumed the floor and I honestly don’t remember the last time it was done. We have laminate but the dog fur and chunks of bone (he loves to chew while I write) collect so it was really nice to get that out of here.
• I tried to organize my bookshelf by putting some of my textbooks away and apparently the bookshelf couldn’t handle the weight of the books and broke on me 😦  So I took all the books off and reorganized them which actually worked really well because I was able to to put some bigger binders and the old computer in there as well (as you can see below). The shelf definitely isn’t done yet, theres still a lot of crap around the room that will probably need to be added but its a little better now. I also labelled all the binders because I was tired of looking for something and not being able to find it. As you can see my puppy Rusko wanted to get in on the photo too….and yes there is a huge unorganized stack of papers there….

Now the big task I wasn’t expecting has to do with that stack of papers. That is such a small proportion of the paper I found in here so far, I can’t even think of an accurate fraction to associate with it (it could be like 1/30th of the papers I dealt with?!?!). I found bills, pay stubs, loan documents etc. dating back years. The stack you see in the photo is just student loan stuff and it dates back to my original application in 2007 which I then declined because I ended up taking a year off of school to work.  Soon, the paper shredder (as opposed to my cat Shredder) and I became best friends (my cat Shredder and I were already best friends you see) as I put the machine through intense amounts of work.  In fact together we filled a full regular black garbage bag of shredding (I didn’t have any blue bags on hand) and we worked through several jams as I impatiently tried to put more than 7 page maximum through at a time. It took forever! Every single piece of paper I found had to be looked at, how old was it? Was it important? To Shred or not to Shred.

It seriously seemed like a never ending process. As I shredded I found more and more and more and more. As you can see by the bookshelf photo I’m still not done organizing them and I feel like I won’t be done until I have deemed the computer room itself to be done. Clean. Organized. Livable. I’m sure there are still papers hiding everywhere.

Luckily I had an accordion file folder kickin around. I labeled the first twelve inserts for the months of the year. In each of these inserts I placed any document relating to that month (of 2013, everything else was shredded). So July has all the bills & pay stubs from July 2013 in them etc. I then labelled the remaining inserts for things like pets, vehicles, taxes, and one for extras from my husbands job (his pension documents, health care etc.) seeing that I am on maternity leave and not on a permanent contract anywhere I don’t have those documents myself.

It is however a wonderful feeling knowing that I have now thrown an entire full bag of useless papers that were just taking up room in my house into the recycle bin. I kinda hope someone tries to take it out…all the bills look the same and there’s years worth…it would be a really fun puzzle.

Every step I take towards cleaning out the old the useless from my house gives me one more breath of fresh air. I was suffocated by stuff.  Since March 2013, my husband and I have taken several car loads full to the dump and to goodwill and now this step to clean out the nooks and crannies is the last step on our journey of being better than our stuff. It feels great! Its just A LOT OF WORK!

For Next Week: I have a box of photos that I borrowed from my parents to use for the wedding….over a year ago. I need to deal with those photos. They need to be put in albums, scrapbooked etc. I hope to finish organizing the crap papers and begin organizing these photos. One small trip to the dollar store and less than $10 and I should be on my way on the next project. (Hopefully). 

Related articles

• Shredding the Past of Me (memoriesofatime.com) I agree with what this author has to say…shredding is hard but also very freeing!