This is Difficult

Being focused on organizing is very difficult for me. And today it's putting me in a bad mood. I feel like I can't leave the house, which isn't a good thing, yet looking around it is difficult to see what has been accomplished. So far today I have established a spot for pay stubs, receipts, bills and coupons. Somehow I believe I've done all this before so I have to integrate my old system into my new one. I have copied the addresses off of holiday cards so I don't have to keep the envelopes, and have put the holiday cards into one pile. Unfortunately I didn't send out holiday cards or display the ones that were sent to me and now it is almost New Year's Eve. I doubt anyone will have missed my card so I'll have to let that go. Besides, facebook allows everyone to see updated photos of my kids if they wish. I cooked a big pot of turkey chili which the kids ate for lunch (I thought it would be dinner but there's still enough left for that.) I have to hand wash all the dishes of course and I took care of that. There's virtually no more laundry to be done. I cleaned crap out of the car and found the ski discount passes (which can't be used but at least I have them.) I uncovered some of Troy's favorite markers in my straightening process. I am attempting to group Dave's soccer things in one box. It's now 1:20 but I'd still be leery to show anyone the place.

How long will it take?

Using each second to be more cognizant of my habits, I find that that there is never a time to relax. This blog is a necessary process, not relaxation after all. The main problem is that I haven't gotten to the "everything has a place" place yet, so that the questions usually becomes-what should I do with this or that item.

Progress and Questions....

Progress and Questions....

The addition of my new kitchen sink and counter has transformed my life already. I can take pleasure in the simple act of providing nutrition to the family again. The counters are lovely, the sink is shiny, the cabinets smoothly operating and abundant in space. Only a few little glitches-bought a microwave that was too big and the cabinets might have to get adjusted for that. Also panicked because I started purchasing stainless steel appliances and now realized black would have been just fine with the new counter color. Who exactly am I buying the stainless appliances for because by the time I sell this house, someone will want new appliances anyway. Now what to do-try to exchange the dishwasher for black? It would have been much easier to just buy the right color. What led me to that to begin with was procrastination. Because of procrastination I ended up rushing my decision at the end. On another but always related subject, I picked up the book The New Messies Manual and started reading it. Not to diss flylady, but just to check out one more system on my endless quest. The book really spoke to me but can I say, not in a good way. I felt scolded, but it was all so true. I have been making a concentrated effort since even glancing through the book, to be more mindful of every minute. The question I have is, should every minute be dedicated to keeping your house clean, or will eventually you reduce the number of minutes. I fear that this blog would be looked down upon by her, as we "messies" as she calls people like us, let our creative whims inhibit our goals to keep the house clean. But today I have spent each minute so far doing laundry, washing dishes and straightening the new kitchen to keep it perfect, trying to sort and put away the snow clothes and boots that keep littering the front door area, drying clothes for various visiting teens, shoveling snow on top of it all, that when I went to pick up my magazine, I felt that I should not be doing that but instead should face that the house was not perfect. I then began what she calls "The Mount Vernon Method" on the area near the piano. I transferred an entire shelf of music books into plain white boxes. Then what-they all went back on the shelf. I can't tell if that actually accomplished anything since I didn't get rid of any music books and still didn't organize them properly. But while I did that I found the Pokemon cards little son was looking for this this morning and I could not find. So her advice was correct, that when you organize, you find things. She advises that you group items together. I found various items that have no home and need one. I need to make a home for the pool table supplies, for example, but what should I put them in? A labeled shoebox would be better than nothing I suppose. Still haven't dealt with the paper clutter. Feel a strong need to get out of the house!

So the 8 foot closet in my room was cut out to make a lovely "foyer" area but my inability to read architectural plans caused me not to realize this until the damage was done. Fortunately, we gained a large closet under the stairs and it is to this closet that my husband decided to move all the clutter in our room. Clutter now exists in a large closet. I have to admit the room looks better but it doesn't solve the problem in the long run.

Back to Friday. Embarassing moment of my life when neighbor asked me to pick up her kids as she was running late and they had never seen my home before. This time there were actual holes in the floor and wall, no kitchen sink, no kitchen floor for that matter, my bedroom door was a sheet of plastic, the little kindergarten boy walked around fascinated while the older girl was too polite to comment. I tried to explain that it was temporary but it has been so long that I lived in a house that was remotely normal that I fear I am getting used to the state of the house as it is. I took them upstairs to view the "after" and there is literally nothing up there so it looks nice, open and airy.

If you went into my home right now, with the exception of the living room and bathrooms, you would be shocked. The bedrooms have borne the brunt of the renovation process, and have had to absorb everything that is coming out of the closets and the kitchen. Last weekend we moved the clothes from our old bedroom closet to the new one, but it was only vacant for a few days because since then I have moved my kitchen drawers into that space. This morning I was asked where one might find a spoon and the answer was, "in the bedroom closet, but don't use spoons, we don't have a kitchen sink." The youngest child's room is filled with plastic bins of toys I took off the shelf but don't know what to do with, as well as all the kitchen stuff from the upper cabinets. Add to that a dresser that is completely inappropriate for a 7 year old to manage and that leaves the poor child's room looking like an episode on Hoarders. There's really no excuse for the middle and oldest child's bedroom looking like it does except that they have outgrown it and are really bad at putting their clothes away. Middle child's dresser is also too small for his clothes. Oldest child is on strike until his new bedroom is completed. But there is no excuse for the fact that there are still many boxes of papers in my room and that is my nemesis. I want to make it all disappear but lack the magic wand. I start to organize it but it feels like too much to undertake-because I feel that there are many things that should be saved but don't know where to put them. I think binders might be a solution for me. I could use binders for all the instruction manuals. A memory box for each child would organize school papers. I see that a friend of mine makes beautiful scrapbooks using things like programs or invitations. So I could start a box for that. The problem is everything is right now mixed and when facing it, a mild form of add sets in on me. I feel unequipped to deal with it. Suggestions would be welcome, but no one knows this blog is here.

Over a month and as you might guess, decluttering has fallen by the wayside. Why-there is no good reason. I am waiting for the perfect moment-which never comes. I think to myself-a day when no one is home would be good. When my kids are home (as they have been for the past month....guilt, guilt) I kind of feel bad leaving them to their own devices while I deal with paper piles. I did actually do something in August, I emptied one large container into three smaller boxes, one for bills and things to pay, one for things to file, and another for....??? I am looking for a few things that didn't surface, like a new visa card to replace the expired one.
But enough beating myself up. I have been good at the day to day flylady routines keeping the main living areas clean. I'm going to give myself a 15 minute challenge RIGHT NOW to attack a pile of paper.
See you later.

Backup woes

I didn't get too far in my decluttering the past 2 days, but yesterday I was caught up in a computer mess which brought to mind many mistakes I have made. Luckily I have been backing up my computer on an external drive since last year's disk failure, but what are the odds that the backup and the main computer would both fail at the same time? Luckily, after a trip to the "genius" at the Apple store, (and really, I have had very good luck with the geniuses there!) I restored the photos, but needed to buy a new external drive. While I was there he was able to repair my hard drive on my imac. Then I had a problem getting the external drive powered with my firewire port. Trip to Radio Shack and everything is working....for now. But I only had the old drive for less than a year so it should be under warranty, the problem is I probably never sent in the warranty card. These things are a problem for me. And receipts are a true problem. What is the best way to deal with receipts? I once saw on a Martha Stewart show that there's a scanning device for all loose receipts. I just can never seem to find the important pieces of paper I need and that is the bottom line reason I want to get organized-I hate that feeling of stress when something is missing. I usually find the missing paper, card, or file, but not without spending way too many hours searching through piles of files. Right now in my bedroom there is a box of papers and as I clear other areas to make them presentable, that's where the papers go. My goal this week was to go through those boxes, but let me tell you that has been my goal for YEARS and it is so overwhelming. I did manage to go through and shred a few garbage bags worth of paper but I'll admit it's only a dent. Yesterday, my teenage son decided to go on a cleaning binge...rather unusual but after getting initially annoyed by this I decided to embrace it. He went around picking up random things and saying "should we throw this out?" so we got rid of a few broken pieces of electronic equipment and I ended up cleaning the kitchen. Today about all I did as far as organizing was put away laundry but I want to vacuum now and put the sheets back on the bed. Having everyone home makes the house dirtier but at least I have less school papers and I'm home to deal with it in small doses.

Emptying Bags on the Bedroom Floor

This morning I decided to go after the bags that are in my room. I have a nice collection of reusable bags for the grocery store which sometimes get repurposed for other things. For example, Jake took one of the bags to clean out his locker at school and I went through that. The stuff from the bag is now sitting on my (unmade) bed because I'm not sure where to put it. But at least the bag is off the floor. I had two bags from the MOMA design store. Those went into the garbage. Please understand that throwing out a shopping bag for me is a big deal as my parents saved shopping bags to reuse. At the time those nifty canvas bags were not a staple of every household. And they saved boxes too. That's a whole other post however. So back to the shopping bags, I found another Marshall's canvas bag with some random baseball pants and a trophy and sunscreen. Put that stuff away and one less bag was on the floor. And I am dumping a broken laundry basket. Baby steps!

Delving into the Basement

Yesterday was productive. We went into the basement with the intention of throwing out a lot of things, and were successful. There are two parts to the basement. This was the part that's actually underground and we call it "the rock room" because it was built around some giant boulders. It was here that I found at least 5 plastic tubs of books and school supplies that I last looked at in 1996 when I stopped working in the NYC school system. I'm glad to say that all those boxes were dumped. We also threw away boxes of college textbooks, an old futon frame and an old air conditioner. When my parents moved about 10 years ago they gave me a bunch of boxes from their old house....although at the time I said throw it all out, they wanted me to decide what to keep. Most of that stuff went also. I only found a few things worth saving. Next we have to work in the other part of the basement. We've already thrown out a lot of things like an old desk, strollers, metal cabinet, and I've donated several bins of toys and clothes to Dave's office (they have clients who can use those things, and they were all in good condition.) One little problem is that for years I taught these freelance science classes to kids and so I had boxes of things for topics like music, gravity, fossils, etc. that had to be ready on a moment's notice. I still have those things. There are also a lot of nice things-sets of dishes and glasses for example, that have sat on a shelf and never been used because I never had the room for them in this house or I had small children and didn't want to put out some of the more breakable things. Now that we are renovating, perhaps those things can be put into use. But until then, they have to stay in the basement. Then we have some things like records (we have not listened to a record since we moved here in the early 90's) old Sports Illustrated Magazines (I already dumped every old magazine I ever had but Dave isn't quite there yet.) Still with all that dumping (we're taking advantage of the fact that we have a dumpster) when you go downstairs you cannot really tell. Unless you saw the "before" pic it's hard to tell how much progress we've made. Still, it's motivated us to continue on this journey and have the basement function as a more organized storage space and not "the dungeon" as we have come to think of it.

The Journey Begins

This post may be indicative of my personality. Instead of getting right to the task, I had another idea: I would start a blog instead. I already had some experience with the blogger website from a class I took, but somehow that one never took hold-although I had good intentions to fill it with my journey toward education technology. But the problem there-it fell as most things to for me into the -"I'll do it later" category. So here lies my problem: I am a procrastinator, I have a lot of great ideas but the inability to put them into play, and I tend to get distracted easily. I'm most happy doing creative things, I dislike the mundane. So I'm more excited with the blog idea than the actual task at hand, but maybe this will act as an incentive. I am going to try to clean up my entire house by getting rid of or organizing things. I realized some problems yesterday when I started doing one teeny corner of the small room that my two older kids share. I had an inability to make decisions on some simple things, like whether to throw away a poster. Well the poster was sitting in the closet and bent, but it had all the NBA teams on it....and I remembered when with one of them, they would fall asleep at night naming all the teams, and it was perhaps that memory that made me want to save it. Too much thought went into a poster that cost probably 1.49 at a book fair. Then I came across an electronic dog my middle son (who is 11) got as a present from a preschool classmate. Why did I hold onto it for so long? I thought little guy (7) might play with it but even he has aged out. Why was it still in the closet. So I'm realizing that obviously I am holding onto memories with the things, but they are not bringing my children any joy (they are only cluttering their room) and I keep thinking of the show "Hoarders" when the kids want to throw things out and the mother insists that they keep things they don't want. That show is an inspiration, I'm definitely not in that kind of state, but I see what can happen when one tries to save. I also think the clutter acts as "baggage" as far as keeping me from pursuing other things. I love flylady and have used her system for a few years and she is adamant that clutter cannot be organized and sucks the joy out of your life. I have followed many of her suggestions over the years but there are few things I never kept up on. Check out her website for some great ideas. But for today I want to concentrate on a few things in my room. I will update later.