40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 22 and 23

I might have to change the title of my own personal take on this challenge to 40 Bags in...er...More Than 40 Days ;-) I lost steam on this project for about a week, but like I said, even if I don't do the 40 days consecutively, I still fully intend to do 40 of them!

Day 22 was YET MORE WORK ON THE DIGITAL PICTURES.  God, I have so many pictures.  My problem is, I take tons and tons and tons of pictures, but unlike Eamon, I don't edit them as I go (he's a smart guy).  And then I upload ALL. THE. PICTURES to my computer and they just SIT THERE languishing, the good with the bad, the wheat with the chaff, the blurry with the perfectly-in-focus, the best version of that gorgeous view with the 87 okay versions of that gorgeous view that I took just to be sure I really got the very best version I could get.  The thing is, you can't always tell from the back of a camera whether you got a good shot - it's easier and clearer on a computer screen.  Well, I can find a justification for everything.  It's a problem.  I guess you could call it digital image hoarding??  Is there a support group for people like me??

"Hi, my name is Sarah, and I keep every picture I've ever taken."

"Hi, Sarah."      

I really enjoy documenting important (and, okay, even not-so-important) stuff in my life.  That funny sign on the side of the road, the honeymoon Eamon and I finally took after 5 years of marriage, my baby's first teeth (side note: she is remarkably defiant about letting me get a good shot of them...and yet I soldier on).  I take these pictures because I want to remember things.  Of course, Eamon would say that you should try to live in the moment more, and that taking a picture manufactures a memory for you by superimposing a fixed image over the organic one your brain stores away (and also can't give you smells, sounds, ambience, etc).  This was the guy who was adamant that we not have a videographer at our wedding because he didn't want just their version of the experience to be what was captured and replayed over and over again.  I had to work to convince him to hire a photographer!    

Anyway...whew.  I had a lot to get off my chest about that!  Moving right along!

Day 23 I FINALLY tackled my desk and the file drawer/storage/printer, and now I can actually say that my desk area is tidy! I took the "before" picture of my cluttered desk...I don't even know how long ago - and I waited to post about this until I really, really had a good "after" I was happy with. But now the desk and the file drawer/printer surfaces are both visible!! I had so many things I wanted to scan for safekeeping just piling up, and not only did I put away/recycle/get rid of a bunch of stuff, the scanning projects are done too!! Now, what's *inside* the file drawer is going to be a whole other ballgame - I'm sure I will have bags and bags and BAGS of papers to shred/recycle, which will be very cleansing and cathartic in its own right. It's going to require quite a bit of time, and Bug's naps range anywhere from a half hour to an hour and a half lately, so I might get to one or two hanging files per nap. We shall see.

Desk and file drawer before

Desk and file drawer after

                        

Perhaps the best "side effect" of all this decluttering, which others who are participating in the Facebook group have mentioned but hadn't really sunk in for me, is that once I've decluttered an area, I actually find myself making the effort to keep it that way.  It's like, now I know how good these spaces can look, and I have an ideal to uphold and aspire to.  It's really changed how I see my living spaces.  Suddenly a pile of random crap on the dining room table is UNACCEPTABLE!!  That's kind of shocking for me, but I'm not going to fight it.    

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 18, 19, 20 and 21

Yup.  You've probably noticed that I seem to be compressing more and more into each blog post.  I'll admit that I haven't been working on this project every single day, but I am still determined to do (at least!) 40 days total, and I'm already more than halfway there, so I really think I can see this through.

Days 18, 19 and 20 were all the same thing, which means that it actually makes sense to put them all in one blog post!  So there.  I have a VAST backlog of digital photographs on my computer that not only need extensive weeding (do I really need that blurry picture of my cats when there are four THOUSAND better ones??) but also need to be much better organized.  As I was going through them, I noticed that groups of pictures from various times in my life and places I've lived were all scattered throughout the big "My Pictures" file.  Even just creating meta-folders for "Life in Boston," "Life in Hawai'i" and "Life in Washington" made for a much more streamlined and less overwhelming collection.  There are some folders, obviously, that can stand alone, but that was a good place to start.  And because I only really have small windows of time when I can do any of this stuff (thank you, 6-month-old baby whose naps are a complete mystery right now) I just kept with it for a few days straight.  Momentum is a good thing.

Day 21, I undertook the small but satisfying job of decluttering the hall closet.  I tidied and came away with two bags to donate - scarves and hats I no longer wear, plus a nice suit jacket (doesn't fit anymore and the matching slacks are long gone), as well as three pairs of shoes.  I also hung up three baby carriers that had been living on the backs of chairs in the dining room.  Quick, but worth it!

Cluttered hall closet

         

Clean hall closet

                

Two bags to Goodwill!

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 15, 16 and 17

Again, I find myself playing catch-up, at least in documenting this process.  But I haven't fallen off the wagon yet!  As you'll recall, this whole "program" ostensibly coincides with Lent, with Sundays being the "days off."  Well, my "day off" last week was Thursday, because that was the day my mom arrived and I knew there would just be a lot going on (so, it was totally not a "day off" in the sense of actual rest, just a "day off" from the 40 Bags challenge!).  I wanted to leave some of the biggest jobs for the weekend because I'd have her help, so Sunday would be a work day - and we got so much done!!

I love my sewing room SO MUCH.  Having a dedicated space for my machine, patterns, books and tools is seriously awesome.  Before renting this house, Eamon and I had only lived in one-bedroom or studio apartments, which meant that if I wanted to sew, I first had to find a surface big enough, flat enough, and stable enough for cutting and measuring as well as actually placing my machine on, then I would do whatever I was doing for that given project, and then it all had to be put away somewhere so we'd still have a functional living room.  I actually asked for a big folding table for my birthday one year, and that was a pretty good solution, but it wasn't perfect.  Now a sewing room is going to be a "must-have" for every new home because it's just so great to be able to leave everything "as is" in the midst of a project and come back to it later; it's really hard to get any momentum on something if you have to take the time to remember what you were doing and where you were on a project.  When I was pregnant I did a ton of sewing - mostly making maternity wear for myself and a few small baby projects here and there, but after Bug arrived, it was pretty much out of sight out of mind where the sewing room was concerned.  I completely neglected it and didn't even want to go back in because it was such a mess!!

Well, I don't even know how many bags/boxes of stuff we hauled out of there - maybe 10-15 all together??  Recycling, trash, giveaway/donate - plus we organized all the gift wrapping stuff, put away all the dresslengths and bits of fabric I had enough of to save, and put all of my historical costuming stuff in one box so it's easy to find.  What a transformation!!

Now that's a room I want to sew in!!

The sewing room was a particularly exhausting endeavor (toward the end of the day I got really snappish at my poor mother, who was only trying to help) so when she left on Monday I gave myself permission to take a breather.  Tuesday was another digital day - I pared down the backlog on my DVR to a much more manageable (and realistic) list of shows.  For example, I record The Daily Show and Colbert Report every day, and I love both of their takes on the news, but lately it's just been impossible to keep up, so I narrowed those down to ones where I was really interested in the guest interview.  

This Wednesday I tackled the bathroom.  The sink had become an eyesore, and the bathtub wasn't much better.  I have a bad habit of buying toiletries and what my mother calls "lotions and potions" and not using all of them, so I wind up with a million half-empty bottles lining the bathtub shelves.  I took out a bag of recycling/trash and neatened the surfaces.  I think it's a big improvement.    

Yes, there's still a lot of stuff out in view, but the difference is it's all stuff we use every day.  Both areas are more streamlined, too.
 
Onward and upward...

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 12, 13 and 14

I've gotten quite a bit behind with blogging lately, but I have a good excuse: my mom is in town!  We haven't been crazy busy - mostly she just came to visit for a long weekend so she could snuggle her grandbaby (Mom still lives in Los Angeles, so pretty much jumps on any chance to come up here and spend some time with Bug).  But just the general upheaval of having a house guest, even one who is as welcome and helpful and wanted as one's Mama, can throw things off.  She has been immensely helpful with this purging project, though!  I had a few key areas I wanted to tackle while she was here and we made so much progress!!  I do come by my packratitude honestly - there were a few times she actually tried to talk me into keeping something I really just wanted to get rid of ;-)  But for the most part having a partner in grime is motivating and makes the work go faster.  So without further ado, here's the rundown of the past few days!

Wednesday: I finished up in the bedroom, organizing Bug's clothes and putting away my mound of clean laundry (although can you really call it clean when it's been sitting on the floor for weeks??)  I also did some more work on my desk, but not enough to take an "after" picture - as soon as I finish the surface of my desk, the drawer, and my files, then and only then will I feel like my desk is DONE.

Bug's clothes gone through for outgrown stuff, tidy and organized

\

No more laundry pile!

One box of baby clothes and a bag of her gDiaper system ready to donate/give away!

Thursday ended up being my "day off" this week because that was the day my mom arrived, and I knew we'd work both days this weekend, so although ordinarily I would give myself Sunday off, this week I switched things around.

Friday was the area *next* to my desk, which needed tons of attention.  It had just become the burial ground for all kinds of crap - things I was planning to put up on eBay, stuff I had intended to donate long ago and just never had, it was a mess.  Walking from my desk to the couch was an adventure.  But now it's all either on eBay, donated, or at least tidied - and the exercise ball, which has been rolling around between my and my husband's two desks aimlessly (often catching on the backs of our chairs or tripping one or both of us) finally has a home!!

Cluttered corner:

Clean corner: 

We had enough energy that the cleaning extended to the rest of the living room.  The couch and coffee table had kind of been my "home base" in Bug's early days and weeks for when she was nursing every fifteen minutes (or was it twenty?), and it had gotten to the point where it was really overflowing with her books and toys and pacifiers and various other accoutrements.  My mom made me see that I really needed my coffee table back - and did we ever reclaim it!!

Coffee table in disarray:

Coffee table clean - you can see the surface!!!

Actually *using the storage* under the side table, imagine that!

 One bag of recycling and two bags and a box to donate!!

Saturday was somewhat less exciting in the sense of having something physical to show for the work, but I did actually do some digital tidying.  My mom brought her laptop, which still had some *very* old files of mine on it (we're talking, writing I did in the 90's, at age 8 or so) as well as college application essays.  She asked me to go through it all and see what I wanted to keep and what could be deleted just to free up the space on her hard drive.  College is well behind me (my 10th reunion is this summer...yipes!) so I had no trouble deleting the college application stuff.  A lighter laptop, in the metaphorical sense, is a good thing!!

40 Bags in 40 Days - Days 10 and 11

Monday's job was to finish the task of uploading all of the pictures and videos from my cell phone to my computer so they can be added to our cloud storage.  I still need to pare them down and weed out the ones that are fuzzy or have poor lighting, but it's really hard to delete pictures of Bug!!  Also she's constantly in motion, so a lot of them are just fuzzy because of that.  I did some more organizing though, moving them into the appropriate folders (for example, I now have a whole file dedicated to just pictures of my husband with her because my mother-in-law requests them often).  This is an ongoing process, of course, because I take about fifty million new pictures of her a day, but knowing that everything up until a few days ago is now in multiple locations gives me peace of mind.

Tuesday I started in on my desk.  It had just become another of those catchalls for papers, CDs, stuff I intended to file or "do something with" (like scan into my computer) and just junk.  Also, the contents of my desk had begun migrating onto my printer and even the nearby couch, so that needed to be curtailed as well.  There's still a huge pile of random crap next to my desk that I need to go through.  Some of it I already tried to sell on eBay and failed, some of it is stuff I want to keep but it just ended up there because it didn't have another home, or again, I have plans for it but just haven't done it yet (like getting posters framed, that kind of thing).  I have a "before" picture of the desk but I haven't quite finished the job, so I will post an "after" when it is satisfactory.

Desk:

 Desk overflow:

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 9

On Saturday I set aside some time to address the clutter in the bedroom (many thanks to Eamon for keeping Bug occupied during this particular effort!!).  Bug still shares the room with us, and it's where she naps, so I was hesitant to tackle the room while she was sleeping.  Before she was born, we set up an area for her clothes and diaper stuff, and divided everything into 0-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6+ months, the idea being that at around 6 months, she'd be moving into the nursery downstairs - that's where all of the rest of the clothes we have for her are being stored.  So we've been trying to keep up with the rotation of clothes, and had already started a box for things she had grown out of.  But her clothes weren't the only thing I needed to work on.  I have this really bad habit of doing my laundry and then just dumping the pile at the foot of the bed and grabbing what I want to wear from that pile.  It's really bad, but none of my clothes are nice enough for me to worry about them wrinkling, and most of the time I'm home with Bug in my PJs anyway - and if we're heading out of the house, it's still all about comfort and convenience for nursing, which is a small subset of my total wardrobe.  But I digress.  The pile has just been growing, and it all needed to be put away.  There's also the suitcase I brought with me when I took Bug down to LA to visit friends and family - in January!!  I just never unpacked.  Ugh.

So, I only have "before" pictures from this particular effort because there was more than an hour's worth of work, but I really did make progress.  The box of outgrown clothes got much fuller, and I folded and organized the clothes on Bug's shelf and made a dent in the laundry pile.  More to come!!

Bug's shelf:

 The upended bag of 3-6 month clothes:

 My laundry pile and suitcase.  

     

40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 7 and 8

I did not get a blog post up yesterday because...um...I don't actually know why.  But I did make progress!

Thursday's area was our entryway.  Like the dining room table, it had just become a catchall, the place for crap that didn't have a better "home,"as it were.  We kept meaning to get an actual piece of furniture for that area, something with hanging hooks for our keys, maybe a slot for outgoing mail, but never actually did, so we just kind of made do with the banister and floor.  All of that stuff is now either put away, recycled, or tossed.  It's really incredible how freeing it is to get rid of things.  I was holding onto a journal from *middle school* that I used for daily writing assignments, and yes, they were kind of fun to look through.  Apparently one of the assignments was "Do you think O.J. Simpson was guilty?" and another was "What are your thoughts on abortion?"  Definitely some sophisticated subject matter, but surprise surprise, my opinions haven't changed much.  So did I really need to keep those?  Nope!  Why were they on my banister?  No idea!

Entryway before:

Entryway after:

When Eamon got home he said the house was looking "noticeably cleaner."  Yay!!

Friday's task was to go through my cell phone and pare down the photographs.  You can imagine how many pictures I've taken since Bug was born, but really, some of them are fuzzy, or the lighting is bad, and I have to be judicious about which ones are worth keeping.  I didn't get through all of them, but I made some progress.  What I really need to do (maybe tomorrow) is hook up the phone to my computer and make sure to transfer over all of the really good ones, and upload them to our cloud storage that Eamon set up.  It would really be a shame to put that off and then drop the phone in the toilet or something.  Which is totally something I would do, because I'm the world's biggest klutz.