My Nice Clean Desk!

For weeks I have been trying to clean off the top of my desk. You wouldn't think it would need cleaning, since we just moved in here a little over 4 months ago. But flat spaces seem to accumulate stuff in my house, with myself as the chief offender. It's a lifelong work in progress, keeping flat spaces clean. Any, all I seemed to accomplish was moving piles, or parts of piles, from one side of the desk to another, but never really making a dent in the total massed accumulation.

Then earlier this week I read an article over at Zen Habits titled "Simple Living Simplified: 10 Things You Can Do Today to Simplify Your Life." Item #7 was "Clear your desk" and I immediately saw that the process it outlined might just work for me. It said to remove everything from the top of the desk, putting everything either in a pile on the floor in into a box. By doing this, I could actually get my organization plans in place and then deal with the items one at a time.

So this morning I found a box and put everything in it. Now I had room to set up my nice color-coded manila folders and envelopes I had purchased and get organized! Hopefully now I have a place for everything. Of course, I still have the box to work through, but at least I can see my desk top and I feel like I have a method in place to deal with everything in that box. So the goal for the rest of this week is to tackle that box, dealing with each item one at a time, until the box is empty. And I think I have until Thursday to accomplish that, since it sounds like Miss Munchkin is coming to visit Grandma again!

See how nice it looks? I should have taken a "before" picture, but believe me, you could not see any desk top and it was piled almost as high as the bottom of the monitors.

While I was working on my desk, the men were installing a wall mount and hanging our flat-screened TV over the fireplace in the living room. Again, I wish I had taken a before picture. The TV was sitting in front of the fireplace on top of an unfinished wooden chest. This looks so much better!

We are not quite done with the project. Now we have to find some sort of component unit that will hold the receiver, DVD player, etc. and also somewhat contain and conceal all the cords that seem to accompany all these wonderful electronic gadgets. Hopefully we can find what we want this next week and be able to finish this project up by next weekend. Then the old kitchen table can go into storage or be used elsewhere. And we'll have a nice orderly living room!

It feels good to be working on some of the projects we've left undone from our move. I still have a few things I want to finish:

• Hang my seashore quilt in the living room behind the couch
• Hang curtains over the window I bought for the dining room
• Get some matching picture frames to hang family pictures in a couple of spots (living room and dining room)

And here is a pic of Bill as he "watches" the Busch race.

I usually try to wake him if there were any exciting parts so he can watch the replay!