#2 - Clean Out The Office

Back to working on "The List"...

Side note, #36 - Go on a ski vacation, has already been marked off the list. :)

Ever since I went back to the world of cubicles and 7:30 - 4:30 work days, my lovely office slowly, but surely became a haven for all the things in my house that I didn't know what to do with… It became the junk storage room. When Dr Pop changed jobs and started working out of the house, it got worse as we added office equipment and box upon box of flyers and product brochures sent by his company.

Add to the clutter two non-functioning desktop computers, two old work laptops, and two old, barely or non-functioning laptops, plus all their accessories, two monitors, a TV we no longer use, every work of art ever created by Boy Pop, and pile upon pile of unfiled mail and bill and well, it became a gigantic disaster area! I did not take a "before" picture, but I can honestly guarantee that the room would be a prime candidate for Clean Sweep or Clean House or Mission Organization or any of those other "get the crap out of my house and give me a well organized and beautiful space" shows that air on TLC, Discovery, et. al.

Well, I am part of a pilot that will send inside reps home one or two days a week to work from there. One of the requirements is a private space to work where you can be hard-wired to a high-speed modem. There is only one room in our house that meets that requirement. My office. My junk room of an office. Because I am so motivated to make this work and so excited to have the opportunity to answer my extension while sipping coffee and wearing sweats, I knew I had to get on the ball. Therefore, last Saturday after Dr Pop and I got home from a great lunch at a local Mexican joint, I retreated upstairs to my nemesis of a room.

Four hours later, I emerged victorious! Clean surfaces! A floor clear enough you could roll around forever on it! Boxes and boxes of papers/brochures stacked in the hallway! A huge bag of shredded papers and trash filled! I'm not 100% finished, mind you… I still have to do something about the old computer equipment, I have a bin and a half of "garage sale" items, I need to connect my docking station and accessories, and I still have pictures to hang. But the daunting task of making the room a functional, clean, nice workspace is done.

The next day, my parents came by and took the old TV. Dr Pop, Boy Pop and I then loaded all the boxes of papers into my SUV (filling the entire cargo area!), and drove to the recycling facility to dump it all. Then we bought a new desk chair. I'm pretty proud of us!

The sad thing is that I did all this work to turn this room back into an office and what I really want to do is rearrange my entire home… I want to move Boy Pop's room into this larger room that is the office. I want to put a daybed and bookcases into what is now Boy Pop's room, turning it into a second guest room/study. I want to wire the downstairs playroom for the high speed modem and Dr Pop's work lines, and turn that room into our office. I want to install built ins in our upstairs living area, effectively moving 95% of Boy Pop's playroom upstairs. Plus I have tons of pictures that need to be sorted into albums, framed, etc, AND I still have a tote bag full of things that should become Boy Pop's baby book.

Sigh!

I'm so never satisfied, am I?