I am a tidy person and I keep my house clean and well organized most of the time. But I recently realized that I am surrounded by tidy piles of random stuff that have no organizational scheme going for them other than co-location.
On the coffee table …
On the kitchen table …
On top of my cookbooks …
On my night stand …
In my office …
On the kitchen sideboard …
And in my studio.
Too many piles. Too much random stuff. So this weekend I am dedicating at least four hours each day to sorting them out and recycling, filing, trashing or putting into storage as needed to eliminate this scourge from my home. One must always beat back the tide of detritus–recipes, receipts, coupons, clippings, this, that, the other thing that “maybe I should hang on to on account of you never know.” It’s a stealthy menace that slowly spreads like dry rot through a foundation, and before you know it, your house looks like something from Hoarders.
I won’t have it!
Seriously, I’m not a hoarder nor was meant to be. I can deal just fine with things that clearly need to be filed or recycled or thrown away, which I do promptly and pitilessly. I just get a bit lazy about dealing with the odd stuff that doesn’t have an obvious place to go in my house, so I just leave it where it lands “for now” and square up the corners on the pile from time to time. But since it’s only January and the year is still young, now is a great time to complete my household filing for 2012, get my papers in order for taxes, and put together my 2013 file box. And clear off every horizontal surface possible.
I expect to post pics of those clean surfaces by Sunday night. 🙂
Your piles are small and neat compared to mine that are dealt with when the pile becomes so tall it starts to fall over. 🙂
That’s the one drawback to the organizing-by-piling system. 😉