Study Reorg!
For a long time Wes and I have meant to reorganize our study. It's been a rats nest of papers since the day we moved into our house. Partly this was because the desk we had was too small for how we wanted to use it - we originally got a fairly cheap L-shaped computer desk (no drawers) with the idea that both Wes and I could sit at it at the same time back when we were living in an apartment. However, it wasn't ever quite large enough for that and didn't really work. Then when we moved to our house, not only was the desk too small for what we wanted, it was space inefficient - we couldn't really store anything under it since it was so small, and it didn't fit under the window in our "study" so it ended up taking up a lot of wall space that could have been used for bookshelves. The bookshelves ended up in another spare room since they couldn't fit in the "study" with that desk there. The end result was two less than optimally used rooms, but although we've been in this house almost 3 years now, we procrastinated on doing something about it.
This week we finally bit the bullet and bought a different desk and today we got a friend from church in to help get it into the study and set it up. This one is also L-shaped, but larger, which ironically makes the room much more space efficient. First off, it's large enough that both of us can use it at the same time and we can still fit things underneath it. it also is configurable in a way that the long part of the L fits beneath the window, allowing the bookshelves to fit into the study. The friend from church also helped with getting the bookshelves into the room, and after he left we spent our time putting the books back on the shelves and getting the answering machine/phone and computer related items back on the desk.
The old desk we ended up selling on Craigslist. It's meant for locals to sell used things to other locals, so unlike Ebay most people pick up the items and there's no charge to sell things. We were amazed at how quickly the desk sold - we put up the ad last night (for a pretty cheap price since we used that desk for about 5 years, it was fairly cheap to begin with, and it had some damage) and early afternoon someone came over to pick it up.
Of course this is also just step one (or maybe step two) of a multi-step process to reorganize the house. Next up, we obviously need to finish getting all of the stuff from the study back into the study. There's tons of papers sitting in our bedroom and in the hall right now that we need to get back into file cabinets (we emptied them so we could move them out of the study in order to put in the desk) and there's still a fair bit of office supplies that need to move back in. We'll probably end up getting a "rolling drawer" type thing to put some office supplies in and we're also talking about getting some wall shelving to put above the smaller part of the L-shaped desk, which is still against a wall. There's some stuff that was originally in the study that we'll probably have issues figuring out where to put it, since they were on half-sized shelves that will no longer fit in the study.
Then we need to put together metal shelving (which we ordered from Costco this week and came in the mail yesterday) which we'll be using to hold gardening and camping supplies in the garage. Once we've moved the camping supplies from the spare room to the garage, we'll work on fixing up the spare room. Finally we'll get to some nice-to-do items, including reorganizing cardboard boxes in the garage (and probably getting rid of some of them) and possibly getting a dresser for our bedroom so we can move the wire drawers we're using now down to the garage, where we can use them to store non-perishable food items that we can't fit into our kitchen.
So, all in all we have quite a bit more work to do, but Wes and I are both pleased with how much progress we made in one day. It's much more efficient than what we had previously.
This week we finally bit the bullet and bought a different desk and today we got a friend from church in to help get it into the study and set it up. This one is also L-shaped, but larger, which ironically makes the room much more space efficient. First off, it's large enough that both of us can use it at the same time and we can still fit things underneath it. it also is configurable in a way that the long part of the L fits beneath the window, allowing the bookshelves to fit into the study. The friend from church also helped with getting the bookshelves into the room, and after he left we spent our time putting the books back on the shelves and getting the answering machine/phone and computer related items back on the desk.
The old desk we ended up selling on Craigslist. It's meant for locals to sell used things to other locals, so unlike Ebay most people pick up the items and there's no charge to sell things. We were amazed at how quickly the desk sold - we put up the ad last night (for a pretty cheap price since we used that desk for about 5 years, it was fairly cheap to begin with, and it had some damage) and early afternoon someone came over to pick it up.
Of course this is also just step one (or maybe step two) of a multi-step process to reorganize the house. Next up, we obviously need to finish getting all of the stuff from the study back into the study. There's tons of papers sitting in our bedroom and in the hall right now that we need to get back into file cabinets (we emptied them so we could move them out of the study in order to put in the desk) and there's still a fair bit of office supplies that need to move back in. We'll probably end up getting a "rolling drawer" type thing to put some office supplies in and we're also talking about getting some wall shelving to put above the smaller part of the L-shaped desk, which is still against a wall. There's some stuff that was originally in the study that we'll probably have issues figuring out where to put it, since they were on half-sized shelves that will no longer fit in the study.
Then we need to put together metal shelving (which we ordered from Costco this week and came in the mail yesterday) which we'll be using to hold gardening and camping supplies in the garage. Once we've moved the camping supplies from the spare room to the garage, we'll work on fixing up the spare room. Finally we'll get to some nice-to-do items, including reorganizing cardboard boxes in the garage (and probably getting rid of some of them) and possibly getting a dresser for our bedroom so we can move the wire drawers we're using now down to the garage, where we can use them to store non-perishable food items that we can't fit into our kitchen.
So, all in all we have quite a bit more work to do, but Wes and I are both pleased with how much progress we made in one day. It's much more efficient than what we had previously.