Office Corner Revisted

It has been months and months since I last tackled one of the Corners of My Home. I’m not sure what happened really. I’ve still got a lot of areas that need serious work, and many of the previous cleared out spaces need a little touching up.

We really struggle with our office area. Part of the problem is that every room in our house is being used and we don’t have a real office. It’s really just a portion of the living room. Anything that needs to be stored temporarily ends up here, then somehow never moves out. If we have people over – too bad. We can’t close the door on the mess because there is no door. It doesn’t matter what the project is, if we don’t have a place for it, it ends up in the office.

For years we used a small rolltop desk and a small computer armoire. We combined the two and got a nice, L-shaped computer table. The old computer desk was damaged from many moves and our flood, so it went out in the trash. The rolltop just stayed in the office area, blocking off one of the bookshelves. It became a clutter magnet, a place to stick stuff on, under and around. Last week, I’d had enough.

Sigh.

I started with the rolltop. Two of the boxes sitting in front of it were waiting to be mailed out. That was easy. The boxes under it are full of Girl Scout cookies waiting to be donated to Walter Reed. Even though I try very hard not to use our guest room as storage, I moved the cookies up there. They will be out of the house by the end of the month and I cannot store them outside. Good enough! The terrarium was moved to a more isolated area, which makes the crabs happy. Their food, sitting in a basket on the desk, went with them. Everything else was relocated. I found a new, very happy, owner for the rolltop and it went to its new home last night.

There’s some junk next to the desk that is hard to see. That’s gone, too.

Here’s the area now:

Look! Bookshelves!

I’m not too thrilled with having stuff in that corner by the piano, but it’s wasted space. I’d like to move the piano to the right for better access to that corner, but it’s already taking up the whole wall. So for now, that’s my yarn stash in the clear box, with a couple of projects in bags. At least it’s neat and out of the way. And now Philip knows where I hide my yarn.

Oh, and I changed the picture over the piano. The first one is a Kinkade of the US Capitol. We rediscovered it when one of my Ten Friends Named Jen came and helped me declutter. I’d forgotten we had it! So we hung it up, but I thought it was too small for the wall. Also discovered in the dejunking was this cool Norman Rockwell print that Sonlight Curriculum gave out one year. We stuck it in Philip’s homework pile to get framed. It came back a couple of weeks ago and it fit the space better. The Kinkade was moved to another wall.

So now that I can access the bookshelves again, it’s time to go through those. I think that’s my next decluttering project.