A House of Order

I've never been a particularly organized person. Stacks of paper, junk drawers, 'corner counter'... these things have always been more my style. The past few years I have been trying to break that habit. It has been hard, and I have largely been unsuccessful. My excuse is always that we don't have enough storage space, and while I would like to have a home for everything, we just didn't have enough cupboards, drawers, shelves, etc. for that to be realistic... so: mess.
Little by little, one thing at a time, I've been trying to find homes for everything. I bought shelves for our bathroom. We got a shoe hanger thingy to manage shoes everywhere. We got a couple of extra book shelves. Still though, the major mess areas remained. One of those areas being the desk/office area. Yesterday we bought a desk! It's a big one with lots of drawers and cupboards. We were up until midnight moving everything, sorting everything, and finding a home for all of our office junk. That freed up our old computer desk which we moved down to the basement. It also freed up a small bookshelf that we've had stacked with CDs, papers, and other miscellaneous junk. That bookshelf moved into Isaac's room to put his toys on, so his toys are no longer stored in a cardboard box under our coffee table.

We also bought a ...thingy... she called it an armoir, but that word just doesn't sit comfortably on my tongue. I'm not sure what we'll end up calling it, but I got it to store my games. They won't all fit in their present condition, but I have a few ideas to make it work. We used to keep the games on a bookshelf, but we moved them down to the basement, and they're in a huge pile down there. I would hate to even try getting out one of the games from the bottom of the stack. I'm super excited to have them accessible again.
One of the best changes though, is that the new desk is going in the living room, where our kitchen table used to be, and the kitchen table is moving into the Kitchen! What a concept, the table in the kitchen! We didn't have it in the kitchen before because the configuration of the kitchen and the shape of our table don't really go well together. Right now, the table is completely blocking our back door, so we can't really go in or out without a whole lot of hassle. In a couple of weeks though, we will be getting a new back door which opens from the other side, so it will be more accessible. So no more food in the living room, getting on my couches. No more milk spilling on my living room rug. No more food crumbs on my piano. No more snacks at the computer, and juice spilling on the keyboard. "No Food out of the Kitchen!" is a rule I've been wanting to implement for a long time now!

Hopefully now I will be a little more successful at keeping things cleaner, and more organized. There are still a few more trouble spots in our house, but this will help a lot with a few of them. I'm so excited about this!