Hey... There's a desk under there (parts 2 & 3)

Things are just getting crazy - first we find a desk under our paper stacks at home, now I find two desks in my office this afternoon. Here I thought lo these many years that I had simply been setting my monitor, mouse and keyboard on stacks of notes, design ideas, and unfinished projects from years of having to stop working on one thing to start and finish the next "super important new #1 priority" (that would then be replaced by the next project of the same status by the next grant or managerial whim). But, as it turns out, under all this stuff:

Were these desks:

If only I had known about these desks! Think of all the elbow room I could have been enjoying. Think of all the times I could have set things temporarily on my desk instead of setting them on the floor and having to tenuously step over them for a day or two. Think of all the paper, books, and wires I could have stacked all over each other... oh, wait - that's what got me into this mess in the beginning. But now, with these desks clear (and even more so when I clean off the other desk and file cabinet in my office), I plan on turning over a new leaf. I am determined to find new ways to be more efficient and organized to be more efficient at work. Any ideas, anyone? Got an item on your desk that you just can't live/work without? As you may have noticed, a knowledge of organizational tools is something I don't possess - so I'm open to any and all help out there. Cause I gotta say, it feels a whole lot less claustrophobic and a whole lot more comfortable in my office - and I'd kinda like to keep it that way.

Garage Days Re-Revisited

Over Easter weekend I told myself I was gonna clean out the entire garage. As it was, I did a lot of work, but really only got about half the garage cleaned out. And, there still remained roughly 627,000 pounds of sawdust on the floor of the garage. Now, "luckily", we've tracked a few thousand pounds of sawdust into the house via our shoes in the past month and a half - but work still needed to be done. Along with the sawdust, here was the primary spot to be addressed in this cleanup:

I can't even begin to describe what is here... but I'm gonna do it anyway. There was an old comforter, groceries (like ziploc bags and napkins) that were purchased months ago and never made it in the house, paint cans from colors of paint we painted over (good thing we saved them, in case we wanted to put colors we hate back up on our walls again), and lots of trash. So, along with the sawdust, we threw out a lot:

OK, so maybe not that much trash. But I did fill up two trash cans. And now, the garage looks like this:

After all those days feeling Helpless, taking The Small Hours to get some cleaning done made The Wait well worth it (I probably owe Metallica $1 million in royalties just for typing this sentence). We finally have a clean garage. All that we need to do now is re-do our laundry room so the cabinets that are currently living in our garage can go up in the laundry room, put up the racks on the walls so we can store our bikes there - and then, for the first time in months, we will be able to put two cars in the garage. I can't wait - because my car is the one that was living in the driveway through the second half of the winter and a rainy April.

it's mario time!

Since Brett's been doing the posting recently and quite frankly, I think they've been lacking in substance, so I thought I'd do a real post today, about some extraordinarily difficult work that we spent hours struggling to accomplish, but in the end the sense of satisfaction made it all worth it.

Do you know how difficult it is to stay together without killing each other on moving levels with heat-seeking bullets flying all around you?  If you don't I suggest you find out and see what you are really made of!

Ok, so we didn't really accomplish anything in the house today, but look at how happy this made us:

And, if I may say so myself, we've been doing so many more things around the house ever since we started this blog that it is getting difficult to come up with things that are blog-worthy, but don't worry, we'll think of something :)

Until then, we still need to get all the star coins and beat level 9, so watch out Super Mario Bros Wii!

"Switching" things up

The "light" certainly came on with this project. We've really "flipped" things around now. The results are definitely "electrifying". I... oh, hold on, I think the bad pun police are here to arrest me...

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, we can move on. From the first time we even looked at this house, I knew I hated these light switches:

I'm not sure who decides to put switches in like this. I can only assume that the people that lived here previously had giant-sized hands that made using a normal light switch impossible. But, because they were functional, we kept them as-is despite my strong hate for them. But as we started repainting the house last week, we replaced some of them. And I realized something as a few more got replaced - it started to make this house seem more like I was living in "my home", rather than having taken over ownership of another person's house. So, today I decided to change the rest - and all without turning the power off (I only shocked myself throughout this whole process twice... but I don't seem to have any lasting effects, though. I only shocked myself throughout this whole process twice... but I don't seem to have any lasting effects, though. I only shocked myself throughout this whole process twice... but I don't seem to have any lasting effects, though). Why does someone do this without turning the power on? Because they are not smart. Regardless, we finally have gotten rid of all the switches that I've hated, with normal looking ones like this:

And, even though it was just something small, I feel even more comfortable in my own home. Combine that with the fact that we've, over the years, replaced most of the carpet with newer carpet or wood flooring, finally painted (almost) every room, completely redone both full bathrooms, and replaced the kitchen counters - and this more and more feels like I'm living in my own house. Now we just need to take care of this room at some point:

And boy do we have plans for this room. For starters, the cabinets we purchased for our failed breakfast bar will be replacing these hideously ugly cabinets. And we'll be finally peeling down this wallpaper (easily only the third ugliest wallpaper that was in this house when we moved into it) and painting it the color of our living room. We'll probably be replacing the yellow sink and toilet in the adjoining half bathroom as well:

But while the cabinets and painting will probably happen soon, the replacement of these two items will have to wait a while, most likely. But man, can I not wait to get rid of those things - next to the pink toilet we once had in our house, this is easily the ugliest toilet I've ever seen. As I type all this, it gets me thinking - who buys a house with a pink toilet, a yellow toilet, a kitchen with ugly counters, and hideous wallpaper in half the rooms? Us, I guess :)

Taking it outside the home

Yesterday I had Ginny and Sorin at my office for a few hours - and it became painfully obvious just how messy my office was. Now, to be clear, it has always been very, very obvious - but it wasn't painfully obvious until yesterday. Luckily, no one got hurt - but there were definitely some close calls as Sorin (who has only been walking for a few weeks) was attempting to navigate around the room. So, I decided it was time to take what I had been learning throughout this process at home and bringing it to the office. Here's some of the dangerous territory as it stood this morning:

It's amazing how I manage to function in this office, but somehow I do. But as I was going through the stacks of papers, boxes, and other items in these photos, I could only imagine what the subconscious conversations were that went on in my head that made this occur. Here's a few examples of what I can only assume they were:

"Wow, I've got a few zip drives in here. Now, I haven't seen anyone use a zip drive in 5-6 years, so I can probably send all these to surplus to let them decide if they are trash or can be recycled or re-purposed. But, I guess I should hold on to one, just in case someone comes in with a zip disk that has a file they now realize they desperately need from 7 years ago. But, if the drive I keep fails, then that's no good... so I better keep all 12".

"Hey, here's that specialized USB cable I was looking for last week - turns out it was in this box from when I moved offices a year and a half ago. I definitely need to put this somewhere where I'll remember it. Ooh, I know, I'll put it back in the box, with the other 27 cables just like it that also lived in this box without being needed for a year and a half. But... what if I forget these are in here? Problem solved - I'll just order 52 more of them, so I'm sure to have one on hand. But where to keep those when they arrive... I know, in this box!"

"Hmm... I literally have no idea what this is. I better hold onto it in case someone else needs it some day."

If these conversations didn't happen, then I really don't know what to tell myself or anyone about how my office got that bad (What's that you say? Maybe the problem is that I've been lazy and have just stacked stuff up for years on end rather than going through it? Bollocks, I say, bollocks. And that's a word they use in England, so it most definitely has to trump anything you could now say in response.). But this doesn't even tell the whole story of how bad my office was - you see the red/yellow/orange box at the bottom-center of the second picture above? That's not even my clutter. Apparently word has gotten out that clutter is allowed in my office, and clutter has been migrating to join it's kin. I had never even seen the contents of that box before, but it's apparently been living in my office for over a year now; and that's assuming I didn't move that box of "not my stuff" from my old office... or even from my office before that.

But enough living in the past. Here's what my office looks like now:

So much better. I feel confident that my children can walk around my office without risking life and limb simply by being anywhere near the floor. And my office is now completely clean.

Well, accept this part:

...and this part...

...er... and this part...

...and, um... this part...

So, yeah, it's a work in progress

♪Memories♫... shoved in the corner of a closet

We decided to finish a closet tonight that we had begun working on a few weeks back - we took care of the main part of the closet, but had not yet gotten to the shelves at the top of it. Here's what those shelves looked like earlier today:

And here are what they look like now - after we once again got rid of about 75+% of the former inhabitants:

Why did we spend years collecting things like this, that we never touched after they went in this closet, another closet, the corner of a room, a drawer, or shifted all over the house in an effort to keep it for one reason or another? We hope we are really figuring these reasons out. On one hand, guilt has been a big thing for us. We have gotten tons of gifts over the years that we have held on to long after the use of those gifts have stopped. We felt like if we got rid of these things, we would be doing something to the people that gave them to us. For anyone that now sees something they gave us has not been kept - whether it is in this post or prior - please don't take it as anything personal. We still love you all, we still appreciate the gift(s), but we have realized that hanging onto stuff just because we love the person who gave it to us, when we no longer love or have a use for that stuff anymore, just clutters up our lives.

On another side of that same coin, we have held on to things due to "memory" purposes. Things that meant something to Lauren and I for a brief moment in our relationship, and felt like we needed to keep something to remind us of those moments. Turns out, we don't. Above all, we have each other - which has kept numerous memories of days gone by alive. We've both gotten rid of hundreds - yes, hundreds - of things from our time together; cards, memorabilia from vacations or events cute emails we printed out, and a variety of other things. And these things, like many other things, were stowed away and never looked at again. Great job they did reminding us of those times in a closet and/or box. We have each other, we have two beautiful children that remind us of each other all the time, and we have a boatload of memories - so the stuff is gone.

There are other reasons we've kept all this stuff, some reasons better than others. Honestly, there are still things we are keeping with reasons better and worse than others - and over time we may decide those can go too. But, for now, we're happy getting rid of what we've gotten rid of, and we know this is a process that doesn't just end in a few more months, but is a lifestyle change.

Now... let's move on to what we got rid of from the closet shelves tonight. Here is everything, trash on the left, donations on the right:

The pièce de résistance here is the MSU Police sign, pictured better here:

Why was this kept? Because, in my mind, it was a great time and a great story. My senior year of college, a bunch of my friends and I went to the Notre Dame football game at Michigan State. After the game, there were so many barriers to direct traffic that we ended up driving in circles. So, when we finally tired of this, we drove up to a barrier, a few of us got out, and we just put the 10 foot long barrier into our van and drove off. To all those that followed us off campus through that barrier... you're welcome. When we got back to campus, we took the thing back to our dorm, and later that year I cut the middle of the barrier out so I could take it home. I had this on display in my old apartment, but it just never went up in our current house. I always thought I'd put it back up someday in a new house, when we had a basement. But, I think I've moved on now - and despite having a great story behind it, it was time to let it go. At least I'll always have the story.

The Desk: Part Deux

I know what you are all thinking - "I follow this blog religiously (because it makes me scared about how bad a house can be) - and you guys already cleaned off the desk". And you would be correct. But what we didn't do was clean out the desk. The drawers... well... they were full of stuff. Stuff that, in many cases, had survived as "drawer filler" since my desk back in college, if not even the desk I had at home as a kid. So, clearly, this stuff was vital to our lives in numerous ways. So vital, that once again we threw out a large percentage of it. So here's the drawers, before (left) and after (right):

And here's what is leaving the house:

So, yeah - now we can actually access things and use them in those drawers. We had essentially gotten to the point where we weren't even opening those drawers anymore, because we knew it would just take too long to find what we were looking for. I can't remember the last time we had used a stapler in our house, knowing full well it was somewhere in the desk - but not wanting to wade through all the crap surrounding one. And now, we have a few, all easily accessible. The next step will be to decide which one(s) to keep, or if one of us will take one to our office, etc. - but for now it's just nice to be able to actually find one. That goes for the scissors, tape, paper clips, and post-it notes, too. Who knew - we had all this useful stuff in our desk, and we had put ourselves in a situation where we couldn't even use any of it. For our next trick, we'll be parking cars in ravines and surrounding them with useless paper, old pens that don't work, a bunch of electronics cables that I kept around "just in case we need them" (we didn't), and maybe even a pack of wild dogs. You know, just to spice up how we utilize our amazing ability to create clutter over time.