Organizing the Office
Having recently moved, the office was being neglected while other area's were being worked on, so this challenge was a huge undertaking. With being new homeowners, the previous homeowners left us all the manuals for everything in the house, which is awesome. What wasn't awesome was that they were in a huge pile on the desk waiting to be looked at and decided if it was something we needed to keep or needed to throw out. In addition to those manuals, I have been saving manuals for everything just in case. I have had it happen before where I thought I wouldn't need a manual so I threw it out only to find out a month down the road I needed it! What a pain!
So, I decided it was time to combine the two but before I could do that I had to go through them so I dumped them all over my desk which ended up looking like this:
After a very long day, I finally completed the task and am happy with my mobile manual keeper which we keep in an unfinished closet in the basement in case we ever need to get to it, but out of the way so it's not taking up useful space.
This is what I started with supply wise:
Check out the finished product here:
The next task was to go through our two 3-drawer filing cabinets and taking out the files that we both need to access and put them in our new 2-drawer filing cabinet that was going to be under the desk. I was able to purge and shred quite a bit of old paperwork so that made room for everything we needed in the 2-drawer cabinet.
In order to keep both my husband and myself on target with being organized, I created two command centers. One is in the stairway leading down to the office and the other is a file system on top of the desk.
The command center is actually pretty amazing and I love having it there. It has a mail holder for the incoming mail that needs to be taken to the office, a dry erase calendar that keeps all our important dates in one location, a birthday calendar by month is next to that with the family and friends birthday's listed and then a big magnetic board holds business cards, appointment cards, and important things that we need to grab on the go. I would love to put a wall vinyl above it but I have yet to determine what it would say...so that's on the list of wants, but I haven't figured out quite yet what it would be.
Command Center pull back:
Close up of the monthly Family Calendar and the Birthday Calendar (from Stampin' Up!, you just add decorations)
The file system on the desk houses receipts, temporary receipts (the ones you keep just in case you need to return something and then pitch after a month), to file, incoming mail, outgoing mail and my favorite the "needs attention" folder
Now to the nitty gritty...here is my desk before I got started in cleaning everything up...yes it's a mess, but there are two of us using this space daily and we have tons of projects going on so pretty much everything out was being used that week.
Desk after (yes we have two monitors hooked to one PC, it's for photo editing since we do photography)
This shot shows the desk, table, file cabinets and book case that holds the cricut and one of our printers on top
Close up of the shelf with the cricut items and the extra printer we have BEFORE I cleaned it, notice you see the battery charger and the box under that is an organizer that houses all the batteries by size.
Same shelf after it was cleaned
Printer/File cabinets after
Media Tower After (it was empty before and all the stuff was in a box in the garage that I cleaned a few weeks back so they finally made it to their home)
Close up of media tower so you can see the labels.
And that, my friends is one successful organization of the office FINALLY! It feels good to not only have the office boxes out of my garage, but all the stuff that was in the boxes are now out of the boxes and in their homes permanently :) AHHHH that feels good :)
Until next time....
Shonda
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