The Dreaded Spare Room

When I first started Everything in Its Place, I knew my goals: to organize my home so that I could find what I wanted when I wanted, and to create an atmosphere in my home that was welcoming and comfortable.  As I’ve continued working with these goals, I’ve come to realize that not only are there steps or individual locations to work on, but there are overarching phases to the project itself.  I currently see three phases: (1) Getting rid of the dumping grounds–these are the locations that are so bad I’m ashamed for people to see them.  This stage is probably both the most daunting and the easiest.  The sub-projects are intimidating, but there are fewer of them (three to be exact), and the work is pretty clear cut.  (2) Cleaning up the details–this is organizing small spaces like drawers, and clearing away the semi-organized stashes of things here and there, the stuff that I’m not all that worried about other people seeing, but that could grow and get out of hand and are not terribly pleasant either to look at or to deal with.  I anticipate that this phase will take the longest as there are many little stashes to be dealt with and a lot of little decisions to be made.  (3) Decorating–at this phase I should know what I have and where it is, and my work is to decide how I want my home to look.   This will be a phase of maintenance and manipulation.  In my last two posts, I have described my work with the first two of the three locations in Phase 1.  I’ve mentioned and I’ll say again, these were the easy ones.  The last location in Phase 1 is the Dreaded Spare Room.

Every story has a climax.  Some are small, some monumental, some are long and multi-phased, some are quick and explosive.  In some stories, there is a long slow build up to the final climax; then everything quickly resolves to the end.  In others, the climactic event happens early, and there is a long journey to final resolution.  In the story of the first Phase of EiiP, we have reached the climax, but I think in this story, we’re about half way through.

The Dreaded Spare Room has not always been so fearsome.  It has gone in and out of dumping ground status.  Though I had it nicely organized for a time, over the last year or so, it reverted to a place I put the things I didn’t want to deal with.  It became my closet of skeletons, and for a long time, I would just shut the door.  At long last, it was time again to open the door.

Opening the Door

Scary, isn’t it?

The place was a mess.  It was so bad that it was challenging to walk more than a few feet in, and then pretty much all I could was turn around.

I hated going in there, and avoided the place as best I could.  It made things like working from home pretty miserable, and retrieving print jobs from my barely visible printer required contortionist skills.  As set my dread and fear aside and actually looked around, I saw that a good portion of the central clutter was really quite ridiculous.

In the middle of the room were two chairs that belonged out at the kitchen bar, and several empty boxes for appliances that I had recently bought.  I didn’t want to destroy the boxes too soon in case there were any problems with the appliances, but that period of time had long since past.  Just dealing with those two simple things made it possible to actually move around in the space.

A little bit of breathing room.

The space was still atrocious, but I could get to the printer with much less risk of physical harm.  Then I was faced with how to approach the rest of the stuff.  Remember, this is all the stuff from the rest of my apartment that I did not want to throw away, but that I had no real clue what to do with.  This stuff ranges from crafting supplies to office supplies to books to old computers. I decided first to remove the things that really belonged in storage.  I know that may sound antithetical to some of my EiiP goals, but I don’t intend on living in this apartment for the rest of my life, and there are somethings that I may want when I am living somewhere else.  I know there are some problems with that way of thinking, but I will deal with those problems later, maybe in Phase 3.

As I removed the stuff I knew I didn’t need or have any use for here, I decided that my goal for today would be to group like things with like.  Once I had things grouped, I figured I would be able to deal with each group in turn without becoming too overwhelmed.  I ended up finding four basic groups of stuff: Paper and things to be sorted through, crafting supplies to be organized, books, and old computers and electronic devices to be dealt with.  I am not sure which group I will start with next week, but as I left the room this afternoon, I can actually walk around in there.

Sectioned Off

So here are my next projects.

(left to right: Papers to Sort; Craft Supplies to Organize; Books; Old Computers)

Oh, and here’s all these stuff going away:

Good bye (at least for now)

There will be more to add to that pile, no doubt.  And just so that you don’t think I’m a total loser, there is a bag of stuff in there that is going to the local non-profit thrift store, and a bag of trash and recycle.  I’m not putting all of that into my storage facility.