Itch to Pitch - The Office Closet

Well I've missed out on the past two weeks of the Itch to Pitch challenge. I was on vacation and out of town, and just didn't get around to finishing anything or posting about it. I wasn't completely idle though! I've actually been working on this one in bits and pieces over the last 3 weeks. Yup, it was THAT bad.

I don't have before pictures and that is a complete tragedy. I just cannot begin to describe to you the chaos that was this closet. I could try, but you wouldn't believe me. It was basically 4 ft x 3 ft pile of CRAP that would come crashing down upon you at the slightest provocation. That's actually why I don't have before pictures. I had to look for something in the closet, and the only way I could get to where it might have been was to dig a hole through the CRAP and clear about half the closet first. Once I had all the stuff out of the closet, there was no way I was going to just toss it all back in, so the decluttering officially began!

Here's a "during" picture:


Picture all that stuff, and then a bunch more crammed into a closet. This is all the computer CRAP I've cleared out waiting to go to the electronics recycler:


In case you can't see it all, there are 4 CRTs, 5 towers, a printer, and a box of smaller odds and ends. Have you ever read those news articles about junk hoarders they find dead in their homes, buried in piles of their collected garbage? I'm starting to think I wasn't much more than a heavy gust of wind away from such a fate!

And then, there was the shelf in the closet (I managed to remember "before" pics here):


The shelf had something resembling the illusion of organization, what with those labeled shoe boxes holding items worthy of careful storage, right? Um.... no, not so much:


Those are 3 (yes, I said THREE) old CD-ROM drives that may or may not have worked when I put them in there, and 5 old hard drives, up to and including capacities of 1200 MB. Yes, that's 1.2 Gigs. Very very useful in this day and age, when I can buy a little flash card the size of my pinky with twice that amount of storage for less than $5.

And let me tell you about another one of those shoe boxes. I was too embarassed to take pictures. Guess what was in it... go on, guess. Old check books... you know, with the check duplicate slips, in case I needed to refer back to an old check. I don't mean like one or two recent ones. I mean all of them. Ever. Since I opened my first checking account 14 years ago. There were checks with my MAIDEN NAME printed on them. This is the kind of thing your family will talk about forever if they have to clean out your closets after you die. I watched two full episodes of Doctor Who on YouTube while I shredded every last slip of paper in there. I had to empty my shredder 3 times.

But I did it. I haven't seen this view of my closet since we moved in:


I sorted through reams of old papers and have this pile for the recycling bin:


Eventually I want to put some shelves in the closet and get it really organized, but I don't have a budget for that at the moment. But this is a huge improvement!






I limited myself to one box of spare computer parts that might actually be useful someday. There's some boxes with extra office supplies, and a box to hold all of Ninja Hubz camera bits. I can actually get to most everything in there without fear of injury.

Look what else there's room for!


Check out more fantastic de-cluttering action at the Itch to Pitch Challenge!