New Year’s Resolutions

This is probably not going to be pretty. I feel like I have made pretty good progress on getting the majority of my house looking better. I am making it more homey, and comfortable. And most of the rooms just require some more tweaking at this point. But, there are two rooms that I haven’t shown you yet – for good reason.

The two rooms are our office and what we call our media room. They are, to put it nicely, junk piles. And they are making me crazy. So, for 2008, I am setting resolutions to get these two rooms cleaned up and organized. Make them presentable – so that I am not embarrassed to show them to anyone. But, before I can do that – and in the interest of full-disclosure, I must show you the rooms as they exist today. Here goes. Do not panic.

The Office:

Eric and I both have desks in the office and I also have my craft table (where I can sew, bead, scrapbook, etc.). This is what you see when you walk in the door to the office. (Note: I do not keep so many drinks on my desk normally, but I’d been working at my desk).

The obvious first problems are that our desks are cluttered and covered with stuff. Also, my craft table has ceased to be a craft table, and become a “crap table” as Eric calls it. I have projects spread all over it.

This is my desk. The file cabinets hold our printer, network equipment, and the stuff that needs to be filed sits on top of the printer.

My craft table. Ideally, all this stuff would not sit underneath the table looking junky and cluttered. This table actually got worse after I took this photo. In an effort to get rid of some of my paper clutter, I have started a project of scanning everything I want to keep – so as to get rid of the piles. Well, in the mean time the piles shifted to the table.

This corner is what I call the black hole. We have two boxes of who knows what, two laptops, a backpack, a box of printer paper, some empty file folders, you name it. This corner is what bothers me most about the room (surprising isn’t it – with so much that has gone awry here).

Eric’s desk. Eric is actually in need of a new desk, one that would suit his needs better. But in the meantime, this is what he’s got. He needs to sell the photo printer on top, and the paper “organizer” is an eye-sore to me. No idea how to store the paper better, but this ain’t it. Yes, Eric has three computers and seven external hard drives on his desk. In the left hand corner, you can see my bookshelf which holds my cross-stitching stuff, projects in progress, etc.

The closet houses our seasonal decorations, and my craft supplies. I will spare you the horror.

So that’s the office. The first thing I am going to tackle is the horizontal surfaces – my desk, Eric’s desk and the craft table. Then, we’ll see what I can do about that black hole.

If you can stand to see more, here’s the Media Room:

View from the door. This room was dubbed the media room because it houses all of our cds, and all of our dvds. The room actually is worse than normal because of two things: 1) I was laid off from work, an these boxes you see on the floor are all the stuff that came home from my office (amazing how much you accumulate in seven years), and 2) we received some of our wedding crystal for Christmas, and it is sitting in the bags on the floor.

The plant came from work. and that’s the only place I could find to put it up high enough to keep the cat out of it, but not so high that it was completely squashed against the ceiling. On top of the small cd towers are stacks of magazines. One stack is to recycle (pass on), and one stack is to keep.

These two cabinets house our dvds and some crystal/china. We don’t have a china cabinet, so all of our wedding stuff is in boxes in this room. You can see some of it on top of the cabinets.

On top of the cd tower in the corner, we have stacked cds and vhs movies that need to be sold. On top of the bookshelf is more china/crystal and our wedding and honeymoon albums.

On the wall to the right of the door are two bookcases, with more china, etc. on top.

I need to do something with the photo boxes. That’s another project – converting all my photos to digital.

Now, there are a couple of cool things in this room. And one day they will look awesome in the Hemingway/Cigar Room I have planned.

The cigar mold.

The cigar band artwork. The one on the bottom is not complete.

In the meantime though, this room really is a pit. I plan to get through my boxes from work and put away the crystal we got for Christmas, that should at least clear the floor. Then we’ll see what else can be done. I’m sure I can deal with the magazine stacks and the stuff that needs to be sold.

So my 2008 resolution is to work on these two rooms. Any help or advice is appreciated!