The Messiest room in the universe

So I'm going to let you in on a little secret (ok, so it's not really much of a secret if you know me, lol) I am a packrat and not that great of a housekeeper. :) It drives Alan NUTS! He calls me a stacker, because I stack stuff in every corner and on every flat surface. I come from a family of packrats, so I really think it has alot to do with this. I also read somewhere that you are either organized or creative, but rarely both. Something about that both of those use the same part of the brain, so the brain either uses that part to be creative, or it uses it to be organized. So I would rather be creative than organized anyways!! :) But then again, I always say that I am a walking contradiction, because sometimes I am soooo organized, I am a list-maker, a planner, I can focus and have some things organized to a T. Like my school work, and school stuff, I'd have my planner with each class color coded and highlited, lol. So I'm weird. But it amazes me that I can be so oblivious to the mess, like my room, it's like I can just not notice how crazy messy it is, I just go on with live oblivious, and one day I look around and think "wow, how did this happen?" lol, like I just notice or something. I have the talent of not noticing things, I don't know. But my room was the catch-all, for anything that didn't have a home. Plus all of my sewing, craft, scrapbook stuff, etc. Sadly, poor Alan doesn't have much of anything in our room, lol. His "closet" and dresser are in the utility room, and most of his stuff is in his "dungeon" in the garage. Our room is really a Florida room, it wasn't meant to be a bedroom, but to have 4 bedrooms, we use it as our room. So It doesn't have a closet. I bought us these fabric, plastic and metal closets from Fingerhut when we moved in, but my clothes were too heavy and broke it. So my clothes have been all over the room ever since. So I decided before school starts this semester I really needed to get the room clean and organized (ok, Alan had been asking me to do it for quite some time too!) So I got some stuff from Ikea, sent the kids away to my moms for the weekend, and we got to work.......


So this bookshelf was holding all of my scrapbook stuff, but not very well as you can see. Not only was it too small and the scrapbooks were hanging over the edges, but I had boxes and bags of more stuff that didn't even fit on the shelf that were just sitting on the floor. So the goal in tearing apart the room was organizing and finding a place for all the stuff just laying around!





Even though this pic was taken after we had started tearing the room apart (I should have taken true before pics, but didn't think of it until after we had started!) this is just about what it looked like on a daily basis anyways, lol. The chair served as a place to put all of my clothes, and my desk was just a flat surface to pile all of my school stuff and stray books that weren't on my book shelves in the living room.






So in order to clean, sometimes you gotta make a bigger mess. :) I started by taking EVERYTHING out of my bedroom and piling it into the livingroom, dining room and kitchn, lol. Hmmm, maybe I have too much stuff? (no comments from the peanut gallery Alan!)













All my clothes piled on the bed as I dismantled my broken "closet". The giant wall unit in the background came from Japan when my family lived there as a child, it has all of these wonderful japanese engravings all over it, and my parents gave it to me, and the matching china cabinet and wall shelves. My brother got the matching coffee table and end tables. But as awesome as it is, it wasn't working well for my needs in the room, so I had Alan take it apart and put it into storage so I could put up shelves for my scrapbook and craft stuff!






After a weekend of work......


It's getting better! The shelving system I bought from Ikea is going to be very helpful, but they told me I needed 13 shelves and I actually needed 15 to make it (it is a build-your-own system that you can add shelves to, not an all in one package, so you only get what you need) and then 2 of the shelves were missing the hardware needed to hold them in place. So I ordered 2 more shelves, which cost more in shipping than they cost, and after finding my reciept and waiting on hold forever, I finally got them to send me replacement hardware. So here in the pic you see 2 rows of shelves, and there will actually be 3 when I get my other stuff. So all the stuff in boxes and bags on the floor in front of it will be put on the shelf neatly at some point! And the desk just has everything piled on it, but I am going to go through it all and put it back in the drawers and organize. So it's getting there, even though it still looks like a big mess!!





Now the bookcase that held my scrapbook stuff is dedicated to all of my teacher prep stuff, teacher books, lesson plans, etc. This stuff was all piled on my desk or in boxes before, so this makes it easier to see what I have when I need it! The desk in the corner is going to be my sewing table, but I still need to find something that will hold all of my material in an organized way that I can find it. Currently it is in the 3 plastic tubs under the desk, which doesn't work very well. The trashbags are full of Starla's clothes from 6 months to 12 months that I am handing over to a friend since they aren't doing much good in my shed as we try to decide if we want another kid someday!






I now have a wardrobe to put my clothes in, woo hoo! It's starting to get more organized....



I bought this bed in 1999 when Bourbon was 1, right before I met Alan. The canopy had NEVER been put up since I bought it, I've been asking Alan to do it since 2000, lol, and it FINALLY got done on our clean-up weekend! Woo hoo!! Now I need to find some fun material to drape on it!



So, yes I am a packrat, yes I have lots of stuff. :) But I'm trying!!!