Itch to Pitch - The Saga Continues

Its been a hectic week for me, and super super hot. We don't have A/C in our house, and once it starts getting over 90 regularly the house just never gets a chance to cool down. So I kept putting off any decluttering and before I knew it, it was Monday and I hadn't gotten anything done :( But I am getting sooo close to achieving order in my office that I didn't want to lose my momentum, so I picked a relatively small chunk and just dove in. Once I got started it wasn't bad at all. Again, I just need to keep kicking myself in the butt and DO IT.

But first, last week I posted this picture of all my computer junk I've decided to get rid of:


This weekend they had an electronics recycling event nearby, so we loaded up the truck and took it away. Now the spare bedroom looks like this:


Yay! I'm proud of us for following through. Many times we'll stack stuff in an out of the way spot intending to "take care of it later" and it just sits (how do you think I ended up with so much crap in the first place? :) But we made a plan, found when a recylcing event was scheduled, and got it done.

This week I ended up tackling one half of my computer desk. As I said, its been a crazy week so I picked a project that wasn't too big. This elephant will get eaten eventually, I just need to take small bites! Here's the before:


And here's the after:


And, if you've been following my Itch to Pitch posts, you know who really benefits when I get rid of clutter:


I swear I don't stage the cat pics, they just love getting into everything :)

Check out more of the Itch to Pitch Challenge!

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!

Itch to Pitch - Week 2

The Happy Housewife is hosting an "Itch to Pitch" challenge all summer long. I am WAY overdue for some pitching so here goes!

Practially my entire house needs to get "pitched", but I'm trying to keep each individual project small so its manageable and I don't get overwhelmed. I've been putting off cleaning up for so long because it seemed like such an impossible task, but its amazing how much can be accomplished with an hour here and an hour there!

My office has been our "dumping ground" for... well, forever! Whenever we're straightening up the house and run across something we're not quite sure to do with, I always say "put it on my desk and I'll figure out what to do with it later". Later never came, my desk got full. So stuff ended up on Ninja Hubz' desk. Then the floor... ug, you get the idea. I have a room FULL of junk. Tackling the whole room at once is just too much, so "Phase I" was to de-clutter Ninja Hubz' desk.

So without further ado, may I present the horror of the "before pictures":

We don't even use that computer anymore. And I'm pretty sure that wall calendar is from 2006. Sheesh! After I cleaned everything up I decided to set up my old laptop on the desk (I still use it sometimes). And check it out! There's a floor under there!

All the paper stuff went to the recycle bin (a couple things were shredded first). The computer and monitor are temporarily in my dump heap on the other side of the room. I have a lot of old computer gear to get rid of, so I plan to gather it all together and find a local electronics recycling place and make one big trip (ok maybe two).

And guess what else? I have PROOF that clutter is the enemy of frugality! It has been MONTHS since we last saw the Ninja Kitty's brush, we ended up having to buy another one (which is too big and none of the Ninja kitties like). Guess what was buried under all that STUFF??

(The brush, not the cat!) Ninja kitties approve of the Itch to Pitch challenge!