Overachiever’s Spring Cleaning Office/Man Cave Edition
Home office = messiest room in the house. Its the room that if company is coming I just shut the door and hope they don’t get nosey. You can’t get things off the bookshelves without tripping over mountains of Army stuff or paper.
But decluttering this room involves negotiations of personal space (its really his room/stuff). Ultimately there are certain things like “Army junk” papers and gear, that regardless of whether they’re needed just have to be kept and they have to be kept in our house. As a reservist he doesn’t have an office to do his Army job at so it all comes home with him. Read this four post series from UnClutterer to follow the same process as we did to get rid of the paper. It has a nice list of which papers must be kept and how often and how best to keep the papers for before shredding them.
So I changed what I could by simply removing every last lick of non-Man stuff, other than our wifi enabled printer and some office supplies and said, ok, the rest of the room is yours to use how you want and called it good.
Sounds easy, but in the process I had to deal with an addiction. We’re addicted to paper. We moved in after his Grandmother who kept every canceled check she had ever written. We have all the tools to go digital (scanner, harddrive, filing system), but we just haven’t taken the time. So I had to remove and process a mountain of paper and then shred it.
Once all of ”our” stuff was out of the room I gave him some rubber-maid bins to keep stuff corraled and then Spring Cleaned.
Overachievers Home office Spring Cleaning List via Simply Stated:
1. Move furniture, vacuum or sweep where furniture had been placed, and vacuum the underside of large furniture items.
2. Clear off desk and clean desk top with appropriate cleaner. Pull items out of drawers and off shelves, wipe down the drawers/shelves, and replace organization units if worn.
3. Wipe down telephone.
