Unf#cking My Office

Only the after photo, because no before photo could accurately portray the level of mess and stress represented by piles of paper scattered throughout my entire office.
1) Mostly chapters of a novel that has been critiqued by my writing group.  I need to go through and make digital notes of changes suggested, etc. (and then use the blank side of the paper for printing the next run of chapters for critiquing).  Also some original hand-written copies of stories.
2) Important Papers That Must Be Filed: paystubs, medical bills, warranties, etc.  Needs to be filed.
3) Ideas, notes and bits of writing, all hand-written, awaiting being entered into a word processor file so that I can lessen my paper junk.
4) RECYCLING!!!!!!!!!
5) Recent receipts.
6) Notebooks and blank paper.
7) Everything Else: full-sheet edition.
8) Everything Else: small-paper edition.
9) Non-paper things found while sorting through  papers.
10) Because no cleaning can get done without a massive amount of tea.
The Everything Else boxes will be stored under the futon* for the nonce, until I've unfucked enough of my office to have an idea of where I'm going to store very sentimental things like old character sheets and greeting cards, and all the rest of what's in those boxes.
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*At least, that was the plan.  Truth is, the big paper box won't fit under the futon.  On the other hand, the box that currently holds my recycling (and is overflowing) probably DOES fit under the futon, while the big paper box would hold all that recycling and probably more ... problem addressed and solved.  

UfYH Progress Report

I'd have put this on Tumblr, but it was giving me problems. So, for background, Unfuck Your Habitat is a totally great Tumblr-blog-thingie (yeah, I still haven't quite "gotten" Tumblr) to help lazy people with messy homes. 

We were given a challenge: pick a fucked-up area of our homes and unfuck it for twenty minutes.  I chose: the bedroom closet (my side, specifically). 

Here's the Before: 

 I finished my intended project (get the clothes off the closet floor so I could put my shoes away, then go through the clothes to find what I wanted to keep, and what I wanted to give to my younger sister) before the twenty minutes was up. So I started a new project. You can't see it in the above picture, but on the other side of the laundry baskets was three zippered men's suit holders (I don't really know what else to call them--you're supposed to hang them in the closet and they keep dust off your suits) belonging to Best Beloved. Only, they didn't have hangers in them, and they had more than one suit apiece (in fact, there was only one suit-set ... the rest were unmatched). 

So, I pulled the suits out, threw away the first suit-keeper, as it had a large tear, and one of the cats had vomited on it long ago (so long ago that it was dry and crumbly, and easily vacuumed up). 

I was in the middle of putting all the pants on suit-hangers, hoping the matching suits would be in suit-keeper #3, when my alarm went off. Twenty minutes were up. 

(And I said, Awww ... but I'm not done!) 

So I kept going. All I wanted to do was get them on hangers (until recently, we stored a TON of extra hangers on the (flimsy) curtain rod above the laundry baskets), and get them out of the way until tomorrow, because Best Beloved doesn't work on Saturday (and neither do I, this week!!), so we could deal with them then. 

As I was hanging the suits on the curtain rod, this is what happened: 

Yep. The curtain rod bent under all that weight (it's only meant to hold a piece of cloth, after all), and the suits, the hangers, the towels and ties and other bits of clothes Best Beloved kept hanging there on a daily basis ... all that fell, right into my arms. So I had to unbend the curtain rod, put it back, and then Best Beloved and I sorted the billion hangers he'd kept for a dozen years (I wish I was joking: BB is a serious hoarder), and then he threw some away. (This is always a big deal.) 

Anyway, we came up with a solution for all the clothes and the dozen or so useful hangers we kept (hanging on the closet lintel), and then I vacuumed some (well, I'd been vacuuming little bits at a time the whole time). And I told Best Beloved that he was not allowed to have more clothes than what fits in his closet and dressers. And I told him we'd deal with that tomorrow. 

So. It begins. We've tried unfucking the house before, but I have faith in this new system (I've cleaned my dishes immediately after using them two days in a row (about to be three days in a row), which Never Happens.) 

I guess we're starting with the bedroom, and we'll probably move out from there, to the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, my tiny office in the living room, before we tackle the huge monster: The Attic (ought to be the office, but ... it isn't). 

I'm excited.