Monday, March 22, 2010

Trying to Get Organized







I had a comment on my blog today from my friend Micaela that said "You are so darned organized Colleen! I suddenly feel the need to do something organizational!" I had to laugh when I read that as I looked around my house. It seriously is a disaster! I feel like I have to remind myself on a daily basis that this is a year long project that I'm taking on and that eventually (I hope!) all of these baby steps will add up and I will actually feel organized and my house will look organized. I feel like a lot of the projects I have taken on lately are small projects that make me feel better because I know in the future I will save time NOT having to search high and low for something because it will be in it's binder in the cabinet over my fridge (and labeled!) ha ha! But I feel like I am still having trouble measuring my success in a day by the things I actually DID get done and not by dwelling on the things I didn't.

The other thing that is hard is that I'm not just trying to get my house (and life) organized, but am also working on other big, ongoing things like transitioning our eating habits to healthier foods that are less processed and being more active during the day as well as having regular exercise sessions four days a week. I'm realizing that old habits really do die hard. Part of the problem for me is that it takes me so much longer to plan meals and grocery lists, etc. while I'm learning new eating habits and the time it takes is time that I'm not working on something else (like cleaning!) I know that eventually these new habits will become the norm and I won't have to spend so much time on the change itself. It will have just happened before I know it.

So, in the spirit of tackling small (seemingly insignificant) projects, tonight I organized our DVD's and video games. We don't have very many, but the ones we do have were a mess. We actually don't even own a DVD player. We just use the Playstation my husband bought several years ago from a pawn shop. Although, we did have the discussion tonight about how I should look for one on Craig's List and see how cheap I could find it, so I guess I'll start that search this week. Okay, so the DVD's and video games were all over the place in these fabric bins we have in the console table in the family room. Some didn't have cases. Others were missing, but we still had the cases. There were some VHS tapes in there as well, but we no longer have a VCR, so those are now pretty much useless to us. Today I went to Walmart and spent $5 on a CD box to hold my husband's Playstation games. That worked great! I put it on a shelf and stacked the games that were in DVD type cases next to it. Then I neatly stacked our DVD's in one of the bins and put away all of the random toys and books that were mixed into the bins. The whole thing probably took me about 20 minutes. Most of that time was sorting. So, although the rest of the family room (also our playroom) is a mess, at least when you open the cabinet door, the video games that we rarely use are now nice and neatly organized! (note the dusty empty shelf in the last picture... that's where our cable box used to be... completely DO NOT miss it!!!... but maybe I should dust!)

No comments:

Post a Comment