Hey... there's a desk under there!

Another day, another feat accomplished at our house. Turns out we own a desk. And one would think I would know that, considering I built the damn thing - but we've done our best to make it practically unusable as a desk most of the time:

Yep, this desk was almost usable. It was serving several purposes, like holding on to months (if not years) worth of paper that we were too lazy to take to a trash can, it was proudly displaying our Turbografx 16 (under the box on the left), and - most importantly - holding down our floor. You just never know when your floor will decide to float away. But, after spending seemingly forever trying to continue to use the desk as a desk (call us crazy) by just pushing stuff over/off the keyboard, setting stuff up on top of other stuff, and continually picking up the garbage that fell off the desk back up on its ceremonial perch on top of said desk... we decided last night was the night to finally tackle this thing. And Lauren, being the amazing person she is, tackled it all on her own while I took care of the kids. Through an hour or so of hard work, asking me "what the hell is this thing, does it even work, and do we need it", and filling a few trash bags, we ended up with this:

That's right - QUAD DESK!!!!!! Oh, wait... I can't back that up. Here's our actual desk (now, usable as a desk!):

Wow - look at that thing. Not only can you actually type on it, there actually is empty space which we could use for functional reasons! It's amazing. What a great desk... the person that built that must be a truly awesome person...

But then, upon finishing cleaning it off, two harsh realities hit us: 1) the drawers are still filled with papers, pens (that may or may not work), crap we don't need, crap we might need, crap we didn't know we had, and possibly small woodland creatures; and 2) now we have to keep this (and everything else we've been cleaning up/halving) clean.

The second reality is the roughest one on us. We've been going through this process feeling really good about how much less claustrophobic and how much more happy our house has been making us, but we haven't started to do much to address how we are going to keep it that way. It's been a lot of fun living in the magical fairyland where we spend six months halving our possessions and that's all we need to do, but now we have to start thinking more and more about how we're going to keep our house in a state that makes us happy. And, how are we going to do so in a way where we don't spend all of our time cleaning? Sure, having less stuff to clean will help, but we don't have a good history when it comes to keeping things cleaned. This is far from the first time we've cleaned off the desk. And we've always let it get covered in massive amounts of stuff that we end up just throwing out because we never really needed to keep it. It's a bit scary, because we really want to not only improve the current state of our lives, but improve our habits to make it a way of life - while still having time left over to have a life. Any advice, words of encouragement, or magical cleaning spells would be much appreciated :)

So, now that I've gone and depressed everyone, let's end on a better note. I know you have all been reading each and every post thinking "good for them, they cleaned {insert item here} - but how are they doing over all? Where are they in their halving?". Well, the answer is coming. Soon. That's right - coming to your favorite blog about an Indiana couple halving their possessions is:

Once it's up, we'll be doing our best to keep it updated with our latest project in each category, both joint and individually. And once that happens, well, we really are gonna have to get this done, won't we?