This is embarrassing. But I am going to let you in on what my computer desk used to look like. Take a gander at this:
And that's not even the worst it's been. But the problem was I had two computers (my laptop and a big clunky one) and a huge printer and a ton of paper. And my filing cabinets on both sides of the desk were full.
So recently I took a day and redid the entire office. We bought this cool new computer desk that looks like an armoire when it's all closed up. But it holds file drawers, binders, paper, and all kinds of stuff. Take a look now:
I just feel so much better. Now I don't always work there. I frequently take my computer into the dining room and work where the kids are. But when I am at my desk, I can find things, and everything has a place.
The neatest thing is how we bought that armoire. It was $1000. But it was also discontinued. So they gave us the floor model for only $497. And it was already assembled. Life is good.
I find so often when I get frustrated about clutter the problem is not me. It's my furniture. I really have no place to put important papers or computer equipment or yarn or whatever it is I'm trying to hide. In my old age I'm beginning to realize that it's better to invest in good pieces of furniture that have storage than in cheap stuff that doesn't. I will never buy anything again that does not have some sort of a drawer. Even my kids' beds have drawers under them!
It's not that we have a lot of stuff. It's just that you want to be able to find it. We do purge quite frequently, but you have to keep on top of it. Even what you do have you won't be able to find unless it's in a logical place.
I feel so much better in my office now. I redid the whole room as a guest room. I've never had a guest room before, but now that we can close the computer away, it looks more like one. We have a futon in there, and I've moved my sewing machine into my closet so that I have a sewing nook. That's not ready to be photographed yet, but after another day of tackling, maybe I'll show you that, too!
Do you need some inspiration today to clean up some small part of your home? Don't fret about it. Just take 15 minutes. Just 15 minutes. You can do it. Even if it's overwhelming, doing little bits in little bites can make the job seem more manageable.
So tackle something today! You'll feel infinitely better.
I am frugal. Some people would even say I'm cheap. I save all my leftovers and freeze them to make soup. I print on both sides of the paper. I save mailings that have only one side of the paper printed on to use in my own printer. It's a little bit obsessive.
And so I have had a pile of stuff that needed hemming that I just kept adding to. Sleeves shortened there. Pants hemmed there. It was building higher and higher, and I kept saying, "I'll get to it soon!".
Then I went shopping with my daughter last night for pants and she bought three pairs. All of which needed hemming.
And I said, enough was enough.
I bundled everything up and took it to a seamstress.
It's going to cost me $7 a pair, which is bad if you think that I could have done it myself. But the truth was I wasn't doing it myself. I was procrastinating. And so all these beautiful pairs of pants I've never worn.
Sometimes a tackle means that you get it done, even if it costs you something. Because sometimes we just need to be honest and say that our best intentions are never actually going to come true!
I don't have any pictures for you yet, but in two weeks I'll actually have some half decent winter slacks to wear. And then I will rejoice!
We've only lived in our house for a year, but it's amazing how messy things can get. I have a wonderfully big storage room in our new house, which is the repository for anything we can't find a place for. Some of it is logical: craft supplies, Christmas stuff, camping gear, and all my inventory for when I speak (I have to have multiple copies of my 5 books and all my CDs and DVDs on hand, and it takes up a lot of room).
Last Christmas this room was gorgeous. But it just went downhill from there. So I spent all day tackling it. I'm going to show the before and after pictures together so you can get a sense of what I did.
Here's what greets you when you walk in. Before then after.
Here's what greets you when you turn to your left.
I can't believe how much better it feels!
I have a friend who is moving after over a decade in the same house, and she's cleaning out her storage area for the first time. She's having a horrible time at it. I've just decided that you have to do each room at least once a year, or it gets out of hand.
This week we also have to move all our stuff out of my main floor because we're having hardwood put in. So I get to weed through all my books and knick knacks, too!
It's amazing how there actually is a place for stuff, if you organize it. You don't have to just throw it on the ground! And when you tidy up, a lot more fits.
I've been trying to decorate around here. I've decided to take a different area each week for the summer and just move around stuff and tidy things up, and get a box ready for Goodwill.
So last night I tackled my music room. I had lovely ceramic flower arrangements on my piano, but they didn't match the decor. They're sort of retro now, but my grandmother had them, and they meant a lot to me. So I moved them to my bathroom around my bathtub. I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier.
I know now fewer people will see them, but everytime I do I think back of visiting Poppa & Dorothy (his new wife) as a teenager, and relaxing in their home, and reading, and laughing, and enjoying wonderful meals. All these thoughts come flooding back, and when Poppa finally died, these are the first things I grabbed (that's another horrible story; let's just say that my grandfather's step son who now owned the house had a 1-800 Got Junk truck in the driveway of his house within three hours of arriving in Ottawa to loot the house. I took what I could get quickly).
So they're meaningful to me, but not to anyone else, and they didn't really look that great. Here they are now:
Sorry the picture isn't better, but you can really see them when you stand in the bathroom!
Then, on the piano, I moved some old books that we had stacked in a bookhelf haphazardly. I also moved my grandfather's Hummels, which seemed to blend with the decor better than the flowers did. So here's my piano now:
I'm still not completely satisfied with it, because obviously I need a lampshade for the lamp, and it would be nice to be able to get rid of the metronome and that silly book decoration thing between the hummels, but it houses my mailbox key and glasses, and it's the best place to put it, since it's right near our front door. So sometimes you need compromises!
Here are the books we moved so you can see them better:
They're just old novels. They're not worth anything, but I like them. The main thing I collect is old textbooks. We even use some in our homeschool!
So here is the bookshelf now that we removed some mess:
The middle shelf is a mess, but that's our devotions shelf. Every morning we all sit in the music room and grab our Bibles (there are about 10 on that shelf in different versions) and read. It's a lovely time together, so the Bibles need to be close at hand.
Anyway, that was my tackle. I'll have to do the basement sometime soon, and that's truly scary!
Thanks for dropping by! Why don't you stay a while? I've got posts on mothering, schools, marriage, and tons more!
This is really embarrassing, but I'm about to show you what my linen closet used to look like.
I'm not particularly proud of it. But every spring, we throw all the blankets in there, and all of a sudden a mess takes over. And then we have nowhere to put the clean sheets after they come out of the wash, or the towels, so everything is just shoved in with your eyes closed.
Here's what it looked like:
A big part of the mess was our blow-up beds that we use when the kids have friends over. They just don't fold well. And when you have one mess in a closet, it's easy to accumulate more.
The neat thing about this tackle is that it didn't take very long. It makes you wonder why you didn't just do it before. Maybe 20 minutes max. I took everything out, refolded it, put it back in, but here's the best part.
I took all those blankets and shoved them in a vacuum bag and made them the size of a pancake.
So here's what it looked like afterwards:
You can sort of see the pancake on the top shelf. It's a little wrinkly looking, and there' s a purple blanket on top. I love those vacuum bags! Just shove in all your winter stuff, vacuum the air out, and presto! No more mess!
So that is my tackle, and I'm very proud of myself.
Now that you've arrived here, though, why not look around a bit? I've got thoughts on grief, parenting, and lots of stuff. Have fun!
I am writing this while squinting through one eye.
I so proud of myself!
After avoiding venturing to the eye doctor for 6 years, I finally went to check my pressures. I have glaucoma in my family, and I really should be getting checked, but it's not fun and I was always busy.
So today I said enough of that.
And they put drops in my eyes, and my pupils are so big at the moment you can't tell what colour my eyes are, and I had to drive home like that (thank goodness it's not sunny here today!), but I DID IT!
So often we put off necessary things when it comes to our health. As a Christian, Pap smears is one thing that is NOT necessary depending on your background. What they're checking for is cervical cancer, and over 95% of cervical cancers are caused by STDs. So if you were a virgin at your marriage, and you married a virgin, you really have nothing to worry about. I go every three years, and I think that's fair.
A friend of mine once told me of this horrible thing that happened to her one day for her Pap smear. She was heading out to the doctor's, and before she left she went to the bathroom and decided just to run a facecloth around there and make sure she was clean.
Later, while sitting in her stirrups, she was trying to go to her "happy place" when the doctor said, "my, aren't we fancy today?". She just giggled, thought he was nuts, and went back to the beach she was trying to picture.
Later that night, she was cleaning up the bathroom and throwing the old towels in the hamper. She noticed that facecloth was glittering. Calling her daughters into the bathroom, she asked for an explanation. It turned out that her six-year-old had been playing with glitter make-up, and had washed her face off right before my friend used the facecloth you know where. Nothing like being incandescent before your gynecologist!
I've been worked up so much this year because my mother has such health issues. She had breast cancer many years ago, so I've been getting mammograms since I was 30. I had a weird tingling in my feet, so I had an MRI. It was nothing, but it scared my husband. I've been poked and prodded this year galore, but I'm healthy!
Men, on the other hand, never go to the doctor. So the next Tuesday Tackle will be to make my husband, a physician himself, book a check-up. I think that one will be harder than this week's tackle!
Sheila's book, Reality Check, is filled with stories of all the foibles of everyday life. Check it out here!
I am happy to say that the weather is finally warm enough that I could get rid of all the hats and scarves and mitts and winter coats!
So my tackle was to get my front closet ready for spring.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take a proper before picture, with all the winter gear still hanging there. But this gives you an idea of how hopeless it was, what with all the boxes for Goodwill at the bottom, too.
I usually keep my hats and mitts in one of those shoe rack thingies that you can hang from the rod, and then give everybody their own cubby. That way we're not constantly rooting through a box for hats when we're heading out.
So for spring, I had to figure out what to do with my cubbies. I decided to stick the sunscreen in there, along with umbrellas, extra flip flops, garden gloves, flashlights (for going out at night!), and bug spray.
I bundled up the stuff for Goodwill properly, and all those snowpants that are on the top shelf were relegated to a big canvas box.
So at the end of the day, here's what it looks like:
Not a bad tackle, really. And it only took about 25 minutes. Now I feel much better about my front closet. And much better about spring!
This isn't really my tackle. It's my mother's. But here's how it started.
She is ripping up her floors to put down hardwood, and all her stuff had to be moved. Her house was a disaster. It came time to put it back together, and I told her she needed to get rid of stuff. She could combine two closets into one and then have another for storage. So the girls and I decided to get rid of some of her clothes.
We purged 147 items. I'm not kidding. She had a dress she wore in 1981 that is too small for me (and I'm a size 6). It looks great on my 13-year-old, but if she wears it I'll have to lock her up. She had the maid of honour dress she wore at my aunt's wedding in 1969. She had stuff that was too small. Stuff that was too big. And stuff that fit but made her look like a tent. So we took it all out and just left her with stuff that--GASP--actually looked good on her.
WHY DO WE WOMEN FILL OUR CLOSETS WITH STUFF THAT MAKES US LOOK LIKE CRAP? Excuse the language, but you know what I mean. You buy that hoodie because it's "comfortable", even if it makes you look like a 14-year-old serial killer. Those pants were the only ones you could wear after child #3 was born, but they do make you look like a pup tent. You have fourteen pairs of sweat pants. You have pants with elastic waists you wear as dress pants. And you look awful in every single one of them.
And then there's the "wish" clothes. The ones that are too small, but you'll get back into them someday.
Why keep them? They take up space, and every time you open your closet door it's like a neon sign telling you "You're Fat!". Why not get rid of them? If you ever do lose the weight, you can get a new wardrobe!
I think all of us have far too many clothes anyway. Far better to have seven outfits that we feel great in than 45 that make us feel like slugs. I actually don't have that many clothes, but I look great in everything. I purge constantly. And I know I'm a size 6, but I also have no chest, so it's not totally easy to find clothes that make me look shapely. So often I buy stuff on sale because it's a bargain, get it home, and realize it really doesn't fit. It's not a bargain if it makes me feel ugly.
If clothes make you feel lousy, why wear them? Toss them. No matter how much they cost.
And that's what we're doing with this mess in my car. It's all going to Goodwill or to a consignment store. But it's out of Mom's closet. And that's a good thing.
So today I am not doing a big manual tackle because I am feeling sorry for myself. I got stitches and my finger is out of commission.
But there is something I need to do.
Notice something wrong there? It is not March 23 anymore. Which means I am late.
I also have another one:
The green one was due March 15. So it seems to me I'm late on our payroll deductions and my sales tax for the books and CDs I sell at the talks I give.
And that's not all! I have six cheques waiting to be deposited (which is infinitely better than paying taxes), and new Visa cards waiting at the bank for us to pick up.
I don't know why getting to the bank is such a hassle, but it is. Stuff piles up. And I try to ignore it as long as I can. I put it in my file of things "To Do", that also has stuff in there about choosing cloth diapers (Katie has been out of diapers for 8 years now). Anyway, I really better take care of this before the government notices.
So I shall head off to the bank and try not to think about my poor finger. Have a good Tuesday!
It's Tackle it Tuesday, and today I don't have the energy to do anything more than something small.
I quit Diet Pepsi for the 42nd time yesterday, and I haven't had one all day. You really can't expect much out of me right now.
But I thought I could do a drawer.
This mess is a drawer in our dining room where we keep our napkins and placemats and other stuff for the table.
I thought it wouldn't be a big deal to clean it.
I was wrong.
I emptied it, and there were three knives I've been looking for for ages. And a card game. And lots and lots of dried food particles. I had to go down to the basement and get out our central vac! Then I had to put a ton of napkins in the wash. Ugh. I can't believe I was using those.
Anyway, I did clean it. Here's the after:
As you can see, the placemats and napkins are now neat and actually fit. The purple books are little "grace" books with thirty-one graces you can sing. They're to tunes of familiar hymns, but the words are rewritten to have to do with food. They're awesome. One for each day of the month.
There's also the Bible and poetry book that we read from every night. Now everything is easy to get to, and we won't be embarrassed when company comes. I wonder how long that will last?
The point, my friends, is this: even if you only have 5 minutes, you an always tackle something! Just keep the vacuum nearby!
It's Tackle it Tuesday, and this morning, when my 13-year-old Rebecca was emptying the dishwasher, she got quite perturbed at the state of our Tupperware cupboard. Here's why:
She didn't want to have to shove more Tupperware in there, and since I like my kids doing the dishes, I don't want to do anything to discourage her enthusiasm.
So I thought I'd better tackle it!
I ended up throwing out three containers which were redundant. Then I found three expensive Tupperware containers I bought once that are supposed to keep veggies fresh in your fridge for much longer. I thought perhaps I should actually put them in my fridge with veggies in them. Seemed like a revolutionary idea, so I did.
When all was said and done, it took me maybe 10 minutes, and this was the result:
So why didn't I do that earlier? And, more importantly, can I keep it this way? I sure hope so. The containers on the top rack, which go around on a lazy Susan, are the best, because they all stack and the lids fit each of the three sizes. They're my favourite and I don't use a lot of other ones. But I still never know if I'll need the big ones to freeze leftovers, so I keep them. Now to just keep them neat...
So what are you going to tackle today? Let me know!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
Stumble It!
I can't believe how much better it feels!
