He was working on his desk in the office. It was a mess. Not as bad as mine (which I'll get to in a minute), but considering he actually works at his desk, it was pretty bad. He had a ton of papers to file. He spent several hours yesterday getting that done, and his desk looks nice now!
DH also decided to clean up the pantry a bit. Back in August, I did a lot of organizing in the pantry and the food cabinets in the kitchen. The cabinets have actually stayed pretty similar to how they ended up in August. I'm not happy with then because we have so many canned goods and its hard to see everything, but we haven't come up with a good solution for them yet. I keep seeing blogs about organized pantries and there are like 12 cans in there. How do people only have 12 cans of food??! We have like half the grocery store in ours, haha. DH likes to have plenty of food on hand. I can't get him to see that all these extras as not necessary, that we really don't need to have 15 cans of potatoes on hand at all times. But his motto is "you never know!" So anyway, we have a ton of food we have to find space for, and we don't have much space in our kitchen. The whole thing really needs to be completely emptied and organized, but who has time for that?? Until then, I have to make do with the limited space I have for food storage in there.
Anyway, the pantry had gotten quite out of hand since I cleaned it up last summer. We had several different bags of chips, and those bags have obviously been procreating since then. I should have counted how many bags of chips we took out of the pantry yesterday. It was insane. We'll buy a bag or 2 for a party or an event, they'd only get 1/2 eaten, and then the bags would end up in our pantry where they were forgotten about, because we don't eat a lot of chips. Yesterday we tasted everything in the pantry that was open (talk about a mid-morning snack!), threw out what was stale, and combined like bags of chips. We ended up with one bag of plain chips and one bag of pretzels. So much better!!
When it was time to start putting things back on those aggravating wire shelves, I remembered the mountain of shoe boxes in our master closet. I've been saving shoe boxes for years, because I knew they'd be good for organizing one day. One day - ha. DH wasn't thrilled with the idea of using shoe boxes in the pantry, but I persuaded him to at least give it a try for a while. In my opinion, they make the pantry so much better. I only used 2 shoe boxes (for now, hehe), so I used them to corral chips, crackers, and random snacks that are in individual packs. If we decide the boxes stay, I'll take them out and "pretty them up," as I told DH yesterday - meaning, I'll wrap them in pretty wrapping paper to make them more pleasing to look at every time the pantry door is opened.
So I didn't get a picture of the pantry since its not officially done yet. Besides, it doesn't look very attractive right now, with those ugly shoe boxes sticking out like sore thumbs! We'll see how functional it proves to be this week, and then I'll post a progress. ( :
Saturday night, I stayed up way too late going through my closet again. I go through my clothes periodically, and take out anything I can't or don't wear anymore. Lately, I've been pretty tough on my selections. I can be very sentimental, and I was holding on to a lot of clothes that I hated to wear, but couldn't give them up because my mama gave them to me. Or I wore that shirt when I met my husband. Or any other reason I could come up with. Or even, I might need to wear that shirt one day....yeah right.
Last January, I donated a ginormous trash bag full of clothes and shoes and still had way too many clothes in my closet. I think I went through the clothes again 2 or 3 more times last year. And this is the 2nd time I've done it this year. (That should tell you how many clothes I have. Actually, that might tell you I have nothing left!! On the contrary, my side of the closet is still extremely cramped. Its just not quite as cramped as it was before.)
The thing is, I rarely buy myself clothes. And I don't think DH has ever bought me an article of clothing. My mama is the culprit. She loves to buy clothes for me for some reason. She's really good at it, too. I go to a store and never see a single thing I like. Mama will go to the same store and later bring me several things that I end up loving. I've been stressing to her lately to STOP, though. I seriously don't need any more clothes. I digress. ( :
Saturday night I got rid of a bunch of clothes (which I just realized I left at home...crap. I'll have to donate them another day...), even some that I still wear (but shouldn't). Then I organized the remaining shirts into sections: casual t-shirts (that I wear at home after work and on weekends - no dressing up for stayin home!), work shirts (I have a ton of these, but my boss bought them all), nicer t-shirts (like fitted tees or short-sleeved shirts with designs, which deem them going-out-worthy), 3/4-length sleeved shirts, sweaters, cardigans (again I have a ton of these, but I wear one to work almost every day - I am cardi-obsessed), casual long-sleeved shirts, nicer long-sleeved shirts, and then finally my dresses and "church" shirts. (All my skirts and dress pants have to go on DH's side of the closet since he has 2 rods - I only have 1 rod. And all my jeans and khakis are folded. I wish I could hang pants!) I thought about further organizing my shirts by color within each category, but I thought that would be overkill and I'd probably never keep it up. Plus I'd probably look at my clothes and think "hmm...I don't have a green long-sleeved shirt?!" and go buy one. :/
So now my hanging clothes in the closet look much better. I still have way too many, but unless I get down to the absolute bare minimum, I think this is as good as it's gonna get. And I don't like to have to do laundry just so I'll have a clean shirt. So I think I'm good now. As far as the rest of the closet....yikes. I had it extremely organized last winter, but its gotten way out of hand since then. I'm trying to convince DH to build me a small shelf for my shoes so I won't have to buy one. Once I have that, I plan to work on the rest of the closet. I probably need to get rid of some shoes again, too....*sigh*
My last weekend project was to tackle my desk in the office. I've been planning to do this for a while. In fact, I took some "before" pictures on January 1:
What's sad is that since these pictures were taken over a month ago, it had gotten so much worse than that. :(
But yesterday I cleaned everything off the piano, so now I can play it (if I ever find the time...maybe that's the real reason I never do!). In fact, C serenaded DH and I with tunes on the piano while we were working in the office yesterday. ( :
I also completely cleaned off my desk. I didn't take any "after" pictures, but trust me when I say it is MUCH better. Though not "good" yet. Basically all I did yesterday was throw away a ton of papers that didn't need to be saved, and organize the rest into piles to deal with later. I can only do so much with a bored, sick toddler hanging around! I plan of using more of my old shoe boxes to help with organization around my desk. But I'm also toying with the idea of getting rid of the desk altogether. I don't use it anymore, but I do need the storage space. We'll see what happens.
I hate that I didn't get any "in progress" pictures this weekend! But I am proud of us for getting some things done around the house. I'm beginning to think that our house will forever be a work in progress, though! But that's okay. I can never be bored at home, with all the projects I have in mind!! ( :
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