Clearing out the clutter

With 2007 wind­ing down it’s time to reflect about the years events and con­sider upcom­ing 2008. Once of the things that will help bring 2007 to a close and pre­pare me to dive into 2008 will be to clear out the clut­ter. By nature I’m a stacker. I have stacks and piles of things in var­i­ous places. It starts off inno­cently enough on my desk with a sheet or two and before you know it a pile has been born. Who knew cre­ation could start so simply?

Even­tu­ally the pile becomes more than the desk can han­dle and it becomes a stack or two. Hmmmm.….is this how rab­bits mul­ti­ply? Pretty soon there are sev­eral stacks and a mini sky­line is born. Once again I’m get­ting the idea I have a pro­duc­tion fac­tory here. Over­all, I have a good idea of what is where and can locate things. The taller a stack get, the more dif­fi­cult that task becomes. When I haven’t touched a stack in a while or I get tired of look­ing at it the stacks gets rel­e­gated to a box. The box then goes into the closet. It’s the place where boxes live, isn’t it?

Over the course of the last cou­ple of years the closet in my office has become home to office sup­plies (on the shelves), my son’s old pc parts and cpu’s (look under the boxes), books, 3.5″ floppy disks (I don’t even own a com­puter with a 3.5″ drive any­more), ebay items that are wait­ing to get listed or did not sell (wire bas­ket shelf stor­age), and of course the boxes full of paper stacks. What is in the boxes? It varies from invoices, receipts, junk mail, bills, and even school projects. Busi­ness and per­sonal stacks are mostly sep­a­rated, but occa­sional there is an errant page to be found in the mix.

For some time I have been look­ing to cre­ate an in-house stu­dio. Work­ing from home and home­school­ing takes up quite a bit of space. So far, I have not been suc­cess­ful at con­vinc­ing my fam­ily to help me turn a por­tion of the attic into a stu­dio. I did get a warmer recep­tion to my idea of the closet being a good size for a sound booth.

So while my dream of an in-house stu­dio may not be close to a real­ity, a sound booth will be soon. Well, as soon as I can clear out the clut­ter. Which brings me back to my rea­son­ing for post­ing the pics of my embar­rass­ingly clut­tered desk and closet. My goal is to be done by Fri­day, Decem­ber 28th. Not just the clear­ing out of the desk and closet clut­ter, but the throw­ing out and recy­cling of unneeded stuff. I mean, do I really need the plas­tic case to a CD that is only God knows where?

By Fri­day the closet should be empty, the boxes should be gone and all the stacks inside the boxes should either be filed or thrown. The ebay items will be donated to Good­will. At the very least I can take a tax-deduction. My son is on his own with his items. I am tak­ing them out and putting them in his room.

With that done the goal is to spend the week­end turn­ing my (hope­fully) empty closet into a sound booth. My hus­band has stated, “As soon as you clear out that closet I can get to work on your sound booth.” Will it hap­pen? I’m look­ing to you to keep me hon­est. If by Fri­day I haven’t posted a pic of my empty closet. You have my per­mis­sion to call me out.

I’ve gotta go now. The boxes are call­ing me. Wait a minute, wasn’t there a Twi­light Zone like this?

Tags: , clutter, Jennifer Navarrete, sound booth