The Elephant in the Room

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There is an elephant in the room. I will attempt to eat it one bite at a time, but I am going to need your help. So, let me tell you about my elephant. When I was setting my goals for the year, I decided one of my goals would and should be to completely go through everything and do a serious and complete cleaning of the contents of my eight-foot square office that was a breakfast nook in its former life. I recently realized that somehow five months of this year have gotten away from me and NOTHING has gotten done on this goal. I thought it was a very doable goal when I was making it and having an entire year to accomplish it seemed more than generous.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I decided to take pictures of each area I needed to tackle to complete this project. I thought it might help me to SEE the mess without actually being IN the mess because this helped me years ago to get the attic organized. Part of me is hoping that if I post my mess here and tell the world about my goal that this will force me to actually get the work done in the next seven months.

I set a mini goal over the weekend of just tackling one of the small areas so I could say I had gotten something done. Unfortunately, I was paralyzed by the overwhelming impossibility of the task as a whole and couldn’t figure out where to start. So, I did nothing.

Several weeks ago, I attempted one of the file drawers that I knew I hadn’t used anything out of for a year or more thinking it would be easy to declutter that drawer. I thought it was full of old craft ideas and travel articles and such that I could easily get rid of after all this time. Unfortunately, I discovered it was full of genealogy research files that I want and need to keep indefinitely. I think I may have moved most of the unused files to a file cabinet in the basement to archive them but these files, being genealogy files couldn’t be archived that way.

So, if anyone is out there reading this, I need your help. Please help hold me accountable. I am thinking that I will try to do an update on any progress every month or two. If I don’t do an update, I need someone to be willing to call me on it. That is where you dear reader come in. If you have a suggestion on which area I should tackle next or want to see what progress I have made, please comment here or email me. I may do a quick video update from time to time. If you think it would be helpful, I could even try video recording the declutter/cleaning process. Let me know what suggestions or tips you have, please.

Here are all the areas needing to be tackled:

1. Six full file drawers that are so tight I can’t file anything.
2. Four smaller drawers of stuff in the two small file cabinets
3. Four shelves in the top of the china cabinet
4. Two shelves in the bottom of the china cabinet
5. Top of the hutch
6. Left and right sides of the hutch
7. Middle library book shelf of the hutch
8. Area between china cabinet doors and file cabinet
9. Area between right side of desk and large black file cabinet
10. Corner under desks
11. Top of saddle stool under desk
12. Top of short file on left of desk
13. Top of tall black file cabinet
14. Left side of desktop
15. Drawer under left desktop (forgot to take photo of this)
16. Scanner area of desktop
17. Right side of right desktop
18. Shelf under right side of hutch
19. Glass and metal shelf in corner between doors

A piece of cake right? Yeah, a nutty fruitcake, maybe. Oh, did I forget to mention that one of my superpowers is being able to pack tons of stuff into incredibly small spaces?

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