Almost sorted!

The project of organizing began yesterday. From 1 pm until 5:30 pm, Tracy (AKA Miss Organized and some of my mess in the picture) and I sorted. We went through drawers and cabinets and closets and I have a couple dozen boxes of sorted stuff to prove it.

No, we're not quite done with that portion of the project, but I ran out of steam! Tracy says my mess wasn't as bad as some she sees...at least much of it was categorized. That means I had a drawer filled with electronic stuff, but you could also find a few bits of electronic stuff elsewhere. It's the finding it elsewhere we fixed yesterday.

Now, all my electronics-related items are in one or two boxes. It's the paper- and pen-related "stuff" that filled seven or eight boxes. In addition to those, I now have boxes for awards, memorabilia, travel, office supplies, and computer-related. I have a huge, contractor-sized black plastic bag filled with recycling, another box for shredding, and two boxes to be donated or sold. In addition, I sent Tracy home with several outfits suitable for business wear that she's bringing to a drop-off place for "Dress for Success" (http://www.dressforsuccess.org/whatwedo.aspx). And, I still have the two 7-ft-tall bookcases, the 4-drawer file cabinet, and the 3-tiered-canvas inbox system to sort.

Tracy uses a specific system to guide her work of providing space for her customers (http://www.singledad.com/home-and-cooking/how-to/Easily_Organize_Any_Space_1231526260.php) Sort, Purge, Assign, Contain, and Equalize (SPACE!), and in 5.5 hours, we didn't quite get through step one. I can't afford to have her help me through it all, but I do intend to hire her for another session or two. She was WONDERFUL. I could never have gotten through as much as fast without her help. I am hoping to use her system to complete the sorting and do much of the purging either alone or with friends' help over the next few days.

My friend, Tessa (pix shows her with her Bichon, Jack), is arriving from Houston on Friday (31 July) to help finalize emptying the room and preparing it for the build-out scheduled for 10 August! At the moment, I'm still convincing myself that we'll make the deadline!

So, I heartily endorse Tracy and her work. She's in the San Diego area right now, but I have a feeling that will expand in time. She is connected to the energetic aspects of the universe and she and I found that we were immediate co-conspirators in moving me into a place of peace, piece by piece!

Organizing the organization project

It's coming together...the final frontier...the bane of my existence...MY...HOME OFFICE! I tend to be a hoarder, and I'm sick of it! Nevertheless, it's my albatross and although the messes throughout the rest of the house are hidden in drawers and behind doors, in my office it seeps onto the floor, chokes the walls, and upchucks on all flat, floor-parallel surfaces. My love affair with books has extended to uncontrolled passion for paper and a criminal craziness for pens and pencils.

NO MORE. Or at least that's my intent. In addition to signing that contract with Closet Factory to get the whole room built out into workspace, storage areas, and bookcases (lots and lots of bookcases!), I have a professional organizer arriving on Saturday (http://www.miss-organized.com/). I am serious about this and am determined to get it right. I hope that once I get the purging and sorting and rearranging done, it will take the clutter a long, long time to creep back into anything like it is now. I think I'm safe...although I've only been in this house 5 years (YEP, next month!), I've been collecting some of the junk in here for most of my three score summers, and that's probably a bit longer than I have left! :-)

The real reward is this: when all the clutter and confusion leaves, some fantastically wonderful energetically enhancing goodness will arrive! And when all that good shows up, I'll be able to find it.