We had our second visit from our professional organizer this week. We had done lots of homework, including sorting through numerous piles, donating unused items, and moving furniture. We had come a long way since the first visit, if I do say so myself. We are making our way down the path to an organized life, but we are not there yet.
During this visit we discussed some of the redefined spaces and elaborated on how we would use them on a daily basis. Would the items need to be in the reach of the kids, or out of their reach? Would we be using them daily or occasionally? How many items do we have space for?
In the organizing process, that last question is the big one. How many items do we have space for? Quite often it lead to more purging. For example, my shopping bag collection has out grown the reasonable amount of space to store them. Sure, all the bags were useful. They weren't broken, they were varied in size and they save then environment from plastic bags. But, we don't have room for all of them. In the end, we selected 7 grocery bags and about 7 "shopping" bags (of varying sizes) to keep. That left about a dozen in the donate pile.
That is a simple illustration of the latest part of the process. Getting to "The Good Stuff". Our initial sorting had gotten us close, but once we had redefined the spaces we could see that some of the things that had seemed good the first time around might not really be worthy of a piece of real estate in our new plan. With each new system we set up there is a finite amount of space and we have to choose the things that are most important to us to keep in that space. That's "The Good Stuff".
Sure we still have more work to do (much of it mundane filing), but even as I look around now I am starting to see "The Good Stuff" where there were once piles and misplaced items. We are starting to see the real benefits of all of our hard work, which makes it easier to keep moving towards the finish line.
The kids play with Play-Doh in our new "Messy Craft Area" (formerly where the Eagle's music desk lived)
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