28 Day Organization Challenge: Home Office Stuff

Wouldn’t it be cool if this were my home office?

Yeah.. It’s not. But it IS a lovely design example courtesy of HGTV.com. I enjoy looking to them for ideas. In fact, I don’t even have a home office. Or at  least… not yet.

For the past five years my desk has been moved around from room to room, downgraded from a full sized desk to a small child’s desk, my filing cabinet has been moved around and finally got stuffed in my closet. I’ve had various shelves and stands before finally putting our printer stand to use with an actual printer. And our paperwork has been through various stages of organized and messy, though they’ve spent  most of the time stuffed in boxes and hidden in a closet and the papers have NEVER been close to as organized as they need to be.

I offer up as evidence, my desk:

I didn’t move a thing. I just picked up the camera and took a picture. It doesn’t ALWAYS look like this. Whenever we clean up the living room, we shove things back in drawers and it at least LOOKS good from the outside. Inside it’s a complete mess. And aside from holding the computer, it’s not functioning very well at all.

Next to the desk, the printer stand:

Clearly not being used to it’s full potential.  A couple of times I’ve tried to use it for holding and charging laptops but they don’t stay there. You can see on the top shelf a couple of cd storage boxes I bought for this project.

Speaking of boxes…

Overlook for just a minute the fact that the first year we moved into this house I emptied and purged all our cardboard boxes and swore I was never going back, and observe the two (or three?) cardboard boxes of papers and magazines and whatnot.

It’s not pretty.

I’m sorry.

And last but not least, my filing cabinet… which believe it or not is actually full of lots of neatly labeled file folders. Some of them even have papers in them — can you believe it? ;o)

It does need a little further organization, but it’s biggest problem is that I hardly ever use it because, duh, it’s not easy to get to. Imagine that. *rolls eyes*

So. My mission (because it needs to be done) is to organize all the home office stuff because I will have  a home office in the near future! Yeah, baby!

So what to do?? Well, there’s a PROCESS.

Step 1 is my favorite. It’s the PLAN part. =) So here’s the plan:

1. I want to set up a system that will easily move into the next house, making setting up a home office easy to do.
2. To do that I need to purge EVERYTHING that I don’t need or intend on using any time soon.
3. I need to use storage options that are easily transferable for new spaces and arrangements, that are flexible, inexpensive and space-saving.
4. My desk needs to function as more than an oversized monitor stand. I need it to hold everyday office supplies so they have a place to go (top two drawers.) I need it to house some kind of system for incoming mail and “action” papers (middle and bottom drawer.)
5. The printer stand has space WAITING to be put to good use, and we have a ton of cd-roms, power cords, and chargeable devices that need good homes. It’s a perfect match.
6. The file cabinet needs to be moved out of my closet, further organized, purged where necessary and then put to good use. Moving the fish tank back to it’s previous location (it moved to make room for the Christmas tree) will make room for the file cabinet to go by the desk.
7. I need to purchase a fire proof box to create a an “emergency box” that can hold all the important documents that need to be saved in case of house fire or other emergency.

That’s my plan. There’s a little bit more to it than that, but that’s the plan in a nutshell. I’ve already started on the next step in the PROCESS, the R – “Remove.” I’ve tackled the top two drawers of the desk and the rest of the desk is soon to follow.

When I’m all done, I’ll have an office system that actually works here, and one that can be moved into the new house without interruption. And that will be a FIRST in our whole eleven years of marriage. Yay!!

The 28 Day Organizational Challenge is hosted by Laura the Organizing Junkie!