spring clean

Both of our desks are in there, and all the office supplies. It’s not perfect yet, but we can work in there. Now we can use the dining room for dining again, and the bedroom for bedding! Hooray!

I guess my time is almost up for this personal challenge. I never did a great job defining exactly what success would look like, but I am satisfied with the progress over the past weeks and months. Of course there is more to do, there will always be more to do. But now that fall is almost here, I think I can mark my spring cleaning as complete for 2008.

These are mostly boxes of kitchen stuff that have been stored in one basement or another since we moved in together. He’s sorting through them and setting aside the majority of the contents to give away. What a fantastic miracle! We are working together!

But my computer is in there now, on a table, with a chair in front of it, all hooked up and ready to go. So I will be using that room as my office from this point forward, and will gradually clear more space, organize and make things work better and better. Hooray!

Our family houseguest isn’t coming after all, so now I am free to transform the guest bedroom I recently reclaimed into an office. We are currently using our dining room as a sort of office, but not only is it messy—it just doesn’t work. It will be nice to move things into the second bedroom so they are still nearby, but we can close the door on the mess. (Though of course my goal would be to have a functional office that creates no mess. But should a mess occur through some bizarre twist of fate, a door will come in handy.)

So I recently took on a personal challenge to be “all the way moved in” by September 1 (a year from the date we moved in last year). However, we have now decided to open our home to a family member who needs a place to stay during July and August. So the room I planned as our office will now be a bedroom for a number of months. And it won’t be until after she leaves (and after my personal challenge deadline) that I can fully implement my plans.

However, I do not plan to let this change of plans stop me! Even while she’s here, I can keep going through boxes in our upstairs room and organizing my random possessions.

It’s not perfect, but it can now definitely be counted among the usable spaces in our home.

I am about to sweep and mop the kitchen and bathroom, and things are mostly picked up. That leaves me two more days to take this a little further: purging, organizing, unpacking from our move, etc.

We are renters, and our landlords live out of town. They pay someone to shovel snow and mow the lawn, but some miscellaneous yardwork gets overlooked. This morning I swept the open front porch and shook out all the rugs, swept all the decaying leaves from last fall off the sidewalks, and picked up sticks and trash on the lawn. Those things bug me every time I see them, and it was totally worth the time it took me to clean them up, not to have to look at them anymore.

We’re making a major giveaway run today with a carful of clothes and household items, along with several bags of shabby/torn clothes and bedding to be recycled as rags.

Oh, that’s a weight off my shoulders!

Maybe that way I can get a lot done around the house and still do some relaxing that weekend!

: )