Organization is the Key to Success

We had a very productive night at the house last night, even though we didn't work on any major "projects." Over the past couple weeks as we have been doing work, we have been creating quite a mess behind ourselves. Tools have been scattered across every room of the house, packaging left lying around instead of being thrown away, and a layer of dust and debris has settled over many areas as by-product of various projects. It has been driving me crazy. I'm not especially a neat freak, but I hated that every time we went over to our new, beautiful house it looked like trash. I also hated when friends would come by to see our progress, they'd have to step around and over everything, and probably wondered why the place looked like such a dump.

Yesterday after work I told Andrew I wanted to buy a shelving unit for the garage so he could store all his tools and home improvement items in one place (we've been building quite a collection over the past few weeks). There is a little nook in the garage that is just perfect for putting a shelf into. This was a great project for him, because it was like picking out a toy box for all of his new toys. We went over to the house to measure the space, then he went on to Home Depot and I stayed behind to begin cleaning. This is what the kitchen area looked like before I started:






















I got to work throwing away trash and packaging, stacking things up in one area, and organizing all the tools. Once Andrew got back from Home Depot, he put the shelving unit together and began organizing his things out in the garage. I did a pretty good amount of dusting since the project of cutting the groove in the bottom of the stone hearth had produced more dust than a desert storm. Ceiling fans, window ledges, counter tops, every flat surface had a thick layer of dust from the stone cutting. I swept the floors and wiped down the counters. After all the work, it looked like this:






















Much Better!!! Andrew's tools looked like this:




All in all it was a productive evening, and makes quite a difference when you look around the house. It actually is starting to look livable, instead of just a work site. We did a little tweaking with the family room to try and fit the computer desk in there, and this is what we came up with:







I am thinking now about trying the desk on the left side of the couch to see what that looks like. That would really be the only other option. While I think it looks better to have the couch more centrally located on the wall, I want the desk to fit bad enough that I'm willing to live with it this way. A lot of people like to have a separate office area or use an extra bedroom as an office area, but I'm kind of the opposite. We spend so much time on the computer in the evenings that I like it to be in a public area, not upstairs closed off from everything else. I like to be able to be at the computer and watch TV at the same time. Call me technologically dependent, but I like the computer and TV to be in the same room.

Well that's all for now. We slept in this morning and now it almost noon. We need to head over there and get to work! Bye!