We recently spent an entire week renovating our home office. Since the budget for this project was pretty close to zero, the renovations involved removing everything, washing and painting the walls, laying down an inexpensive recycled rug, and then (oh boy) putting everything back in a new, more efficient arrangement. 
It was a lot more work than either of us thought it would be. Granted, we didn’t get started on the office till all our other obligations had been dealt with, most days, but once we got started we worked steadily till that day’s work was finished. The rest of the house was in absolute chaos while this was going on. This house is small, and moving the entire contents of one room into other rooms made us look like good candidates for Hoarders.
When all was said and done, though, it was worth it. The room went from grubby flat white (the previous owners slapped $1.50/gallon white paint on EVERYTHING in this house) to a nice tranquil light federal blue (Behr “Liberty Gray” if anyone’s interested). It feels more welcoming and more tranquil. We moved the furniture around so that now each of us has a tall bookshelf by our desks, and our desks are no longer in a position where we bang into each other with the chairs all the time.
Re-attaching all the computer equipment took most of a day all by itself, since we had to figure out where the cables went and run them through new baseboard cable trays. I still need to go get some USB extension cords so we can both use the label printer and the all-in-one. There’s a lot of smaller stuff (books, tchotchkes and so forth) that needs to be schlepped back in here and put in place.
And ye gods, did we ever pile up books to be donated to the library book sale. This is a book reading, book writing family, and we’re prone to buying books to explain computer software (mourning the loss of printed manuals in software boxes). But software goes out of date, and so do the books that explain it. So we buy new books and set the old ones aside, but until now we hadn’t done a good solid book purge in the office. That’s now done, and our daughter’s gaming books have been added to the collection (with her permission). I hope this means that our favorite local branch of the Los Angeles library gets some money out of them at their monthly sale. I just have to remember to schelp everything over on the proper day for donations.
I also got rid of several big binders full of information I collected back in 2004-06, when I had very different plans for my blogs. Mostly marketing stuff, before I decided that my purpose in life was not to get rich online (as if that were ever a realistic idea in the first place!) Now there are huge open spaces in several bookshelves. I guess the next project, after I finish schlepping all the Stuff back in here, is to start on the boxes of books out in the storage room and decide whether we want to keep them, recycle them, or donate them to the library or the thrift store.
I feel energized! I’ve been a devoted reader of the Unclutterer web site for a long time, and although I’ve always agreed with the philosophy of decluttering one’s life, it didn’t really hit home till now.
The photo’s not of our actual trash pile. Just for illustration. Thank goodness. 🙂
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