Mission Organization: "the office"

Our "office" is in a closet.  Yep.  My Dad built a desktop in there for us several years ago. Our computer is in there, and all the stuff that goes with it and it is where we keep lots of paperwork, kids school and craft stuff, color and activity books.  I love that it is in such a central location, right off of our family room, in the hallway, where I can be on the computer and see the TV at the same time, and where the kids can easily get on the computer to play games or do homework....But lets face it, you have limited storage in a closet as opposed to an actual room.  

So up until today, this is what our "office" looked like most of the time.
Thankfully we really do not have to use it as an actual work space.

Um, yeah.  Just keepin it real!  I didn't even clean it up a little for this before picture.  So this is really, really bad.  It wasn't always this awful, but knowing I was going to attack it one of these days soon, I think I let it build up.


So today, we attacked it!  I say WE because there is just as much of hubby's stuff in there as mine.  I wasn't doing this alone!


So I took out all the coloring/activity books first.

We have way too many!  I got rid of some that were free coloring books from various places we've been, or the ones like they give out on fire safety day at school and things like that. I made a pile of one that my kids have grown out of, like Sesame Street and Winnie the Pooh and such, and tore some unused worksheets out of some of the activity books and stapled them together.  And I kept only a few coloring books because they have only a few pages colored on.  I don't know how we accumulated so many. This isn't all of them. I already had a stash in a cabinet. 

Then we started going through all the paper. AAAAAAH!, THE PAPER! Old bills, credit card mail, reciepts we don't need, manuals for things we don't even own anymore, school papers that I get copies of year after year! And some important stuff that should have been filed away. Halfway through the day my family room looked like this.

I always seem to make a bigger mess in the process of cleaning up another.

We fed our fire with most of the stuff we should shred, so we don't burn out our shredder.

We threw a lot of stuff away, and had a large bag of paper to recycle.

We have a wicker storage cube in the living room with files that Norm worked on.  We had tax files from 98 and on.  So we had a few files to burn and lots of old bank receipts and statements.  


This little closet, and little file box took us ALL DAY!


I will never let it get that bad again!! 


But now we have this!

So. Much. Better! Everything has a place and we even have room for more!....But I don't want more. You can now see my pretty memo/picture board that I made years ago.

Someday it would be nice to have pretty coordinating storage, but what is nice about this "office" is when you close the door, no one will even know that it is anything more than a closet.