So, the house has been a mess. Not the sort of mess that comes from daily living--we deal with that pretty well--but the sort of mess that comes from living in the same place for the past eleven years: odd accumulations of stuff, in corners, in cabinets, and--especially--on bookshelves. I'd about had it with the mess, but, on the other hand, the shear scale of it seemed daunting.
Then I read something somewhere that you can accomplish anything if you work on it 10 minutes a day. While I'm pretty sure that's not universally true, it at least got me over my inertia. Ten minutes a day. I started with the bookshelf in the family room. I pulled books out, stared at the spaces, tried to make sense of it without having any idea what I really wanted to achieve, except more room, since the book piles in my office were overwhelming. "You know," my husband said, wandering by (I was not offended by his wandering. This whole project was my idea.), "I'd really like all my golf books to be in one place."
Well, that sounded like an amazing idea. What if all the golf books were in one place?
I'll tell you what would happen. You'd discover that you had multiple copies of several of the books.
From there, energized, I moved to the bookshelf in the hallway. I got rid of half the tchotkes, reorganized the rest, and found room for my entire collection of World War II reference books, which is about 8 shelf-feet long and which had been overflowing two huge cardboard boxes on my office floor.
I've since organized a funky corner of the living room, the yarn on my desktop, my mending pile, three bags of unfinished knitting projects (using 4 episodes of Downtown Abbey to finish some of them), the enormous pile of baseball caps that was dominating the bench in the mudroom, and one, but only one, of the cabinets in the family room. I'm getting there.
Today's project: ironing. Now, I don't iron. I consider microfabric sport shirts to be right up there with the Internet in terms of modern innovation, and even when my husband and I were fairly broke, in the early days of our marriage, we sent his dress shirts to the cleaners. He likes heavy starch. I like t-shirts. Therefore, today's ironing pile was easily tackled in ten minutes. It consisted of 1 stock tie, 1 linen hand towel featuring a sheep in a Santa suit and the embroidered words "Fleece Navidad," and 8 good napkins, used, I believe, in the formal dinner we gave for my husband's partners. Before Christmas.
So, there you are. Another corner conquered. Hooray!
Then I read something somewhere that you can accomplish anything if you work on it 10 minutes a day. While I'm pretty sure that's not universally true, it at least got me over my inertia. Ten minutes a day. I started with the bookshelf in the family room. I pulled books out, stared at the spaces, tried to make sense of it without having any idea what I really wanted to achieve, except more room, since the book piles in my office were overwhelming. "You know," my husband said, wandering by (I was not offended by his wandering. This whole project was my idea.), "I'd really like all my golf books to be in one place."
Well, that sounded like an amazing idea. What if all the golf books were in one place?
I'll tell you what would happen. You'd discover that you had multiple copies of several of the books.
From there, energized, I moved to the bookshelf in the hallway. I got rid of half the tchotkes, reorganized the rest, and found room for my entire collection of World War II reference books, which is about 8 shelf-feet long and which had been overflowing two huge cardboard boxes on my office floor.
I've since organized a funky corner of the living room, the yarn on my desktop, my mending pile, three bags of unfinished knitting projects (using 4 episodes of Downtown Abbey to finish some of them), the enormous pile of baseball caps that was dominating the bench in the mudroom, and one, but only one, of the cabinets in the family room. I'm getting there.
Today's project: ironing. Now, I don't iron. I consider microfabric sport shirts to be right up there with the Internet in terms of modern innovation, and even when my husband and I were fairly broke, in the early days of our marriage, we sent his dress shirts to the cleaners. He likes heavy starch. I like t-shirts. Therefore, today's ironing pile was easily tackled in ten minutes. It consisted of 1 stock tie, 1 linen hand towel featuring a sheep in a Santa suit and the embroidered words "Fleece Navidad," and 8 good napkins, used, I believe, in the formal dinner we gave for my husband's partners. Before Christmas.
So, there you are. Another corner conquered. Hooray!
Yeah for you!
ReplyDeleteHere is my mental illness: I LOVE organizing & purging! Good job!!
ReplyDeleteAnd I just had to prove I wasn't a robot and that really cracked me up. Like robots can't type those letters . . .
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