Organization

Slowly but surely I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on my organization in the house again.

When I was alone with Alyssa when she was an infant and Michael was working in Alabama my house was spotless and fairly organized. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good. I certainly could have had people over to my house at any time and felt ok about it. My laundry was done and put away in a timely fashion. We had a pretty strict schedule (thanks to Alyssa's sleep schedule requiring her to be in her OWN bed in order to actually nap). My bathrooms were clean. Alyssa's few baby toys fit in a single basket I stored on a shelf of my coffee table in the family room.

Then Michael came home.

How is it that one more person can create so much more mess?

And if one more person was enough, I got pregnant and added another person to this household.

It would be very fair to say that since Tristan's arrival I never managed to catch back up with the cleaning and organization. Heck, the laundry alone for 4 people overwhelms me daily. I NEVER seem to be done with it. Let alone sorting through clothes that are too small to give away, or too big and need to be stored for the future. Yes, clothes are an issue. We simply have too many. I need to address this issue soon. One part of that is going to be turning Alyssa's closet back into a closet and using a closet system to help keep it organized.

The other huge organization project I have constantly hanging over my head is photographs. I have prints and digital photographs coming out my ears. I actually have about 40% of my prints organized by month and year, but when you have boxes and boxes and boxes of prints (and negatives) that last 60% comprises a lot of photos. My digital prints are actually well organized by Year, Month and Week, which is great in some ways, but is a pain in the neck when trying to find a specific photo and not knowing when exactly it was when it was taken.

So my next big project is going to be to backup and re-organize the photos. This time I'm going to go back and actually organize by topic and year. I recently ordered (and partially read) the book Photo Freedom by Stacy Julian which really opened my eyes to a new way to look at organizing, storing and scrapbooking photos.

What I really need to do is go back and really read the book so I can apply her concepts to my own organization. I think this will help me a lot with moving on and actually getting things in albums, though I seem to be moving further away from artistic scrapbooking and simply getting pictures into albums where we can all enjoy them. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who can sit down and be creative when there is a mess around me. My head is a jumbled mess of ideas already, so I need my creating space to be fairly organized in order to focus on my project.

It doesn't help that the space I've started to carve out for myself to "create" might be undergoing a major renovation soon which would certainly put a crimp on my creating and organizing, but I'm determined to get it "work ready" while I can.

This is just one of the many things that are taking up my thoughts, attention and time at the moment. I have to squeeze time into my already busy schedule to work on them little by little. Speaking of which, my time here at the computer is up. I have vacuuming and laundry calling me.