Baby Steps to Tidiness

Last week I had a medium-grade attack of angry-crazy-stabby-brain, in which everything just seemed terribly disorganized and chaotic. After much reflection, I determined that this was due to the fact that everything in the house was terribly disorganized and chaotic. 

My name is Kate, and I am not a tidy person. Now... I'm not a hoarder or anything, and actually keeping things clean is important to me, but there is a difference between clean and tidy. So while I can do a decent job of keeping visible dust bunnies off the floor, what I'm not so good at is keeping clutter, papers, bags and clothing from landing places they shouldn't and staying there for a period of one to... 14 weeks.

This tendency was only made worse following the move, when everything we owned got put somewhere "temporarily" and anything remotely organization-related didn't get unpacked. Last week was when things came to a head and I actually could not take it any longer. 

So I started small. I cleaned off the bedroom dresser. 

There is not a before photo here because when the urge came over me to pick this up I just went with it and was too afraid to stop for anything. Here's what I recall was there, though: drill, paint fan deck, tags that I'd clipped off new clothes and somehow failed to throw away, dozens of loose nails and picture-hanging doodads we had pulled out of the walls before painting, and every pair of earrings I had worn since the move. I'm gonna say it's not a good idea to store your jewelry strewn among bits of small hardware. 

Here's where all the earrings went! Where they are supposed to go, in my Pinterest-inspired printer's drawer jewelry hanger thingy! Did I have this the whole time that the chaos was happening? Yes, but it was on the floor in the other bedroom, because I never hung it up, while ironically, picture hanging hardware and earrings were both piling up on my dresser. So now it has been hung with great fanfare in the master bedroom where it belongs.

I also have a big problem with decluttering mail and catalogs. I always set mail aside with the intention of bringing it into my office and putting it in the shredder, and of course I never do, so then I just end up with mountains of credit card offers in a drawer. But now I've got a real servicey tip for anyone who has the same problem: Here is the website where you can get your name taken off all those rando mailing lists for catalogs and charity drives and what-have-you. 

Also- this relates more to mental clutter than physical clutter- but here's where you can put your landline on the National Do Not Call Registry. We got a "digital landline" or whatever as part of our cable bundle and gave the number to literally no one, and have already received like 30 calls in the two weeks since we bought a set of phones. The telemarketing industry is alive and well, I guess. (Ask your grandparents if they'd like to put their number on the list too! We did this for Eric's grandma when we realized that every time we visited her she was getting telemarketing calls.) 

Last week, between the bedroom and the living room (which got tidied up basically as a side effect of the painting project), I carved out a small toehold of order around this place that I'm hoping to build on. Alternately, the kitchen gut at the end of the month could send everything spiraling out of control. If that happens though, at least I'll have one nice photo, of one clean surface, at one time in this house.