One of my biggest frustrations this month has been that we’ve downsized a room and are now trying to find a way to distribute our office stuff between the family room and our room. When you have an office that just serves as a guest room in a pinch, you can have messy plastic file cabinets and baskets overflowing with papers and just shut the door and not care. But I want our family room to be tidy and welcoming–and I don’t want the kids getting into all our random computer stuff/files/cords/etc! So I’d been looking around for more than just another book shelf for this “office” side of the family room, and last week, I found this ikea piece for a “mere” $450 and this Crate and Barrel one that I liked better for “just” $1300…and decided that I wasn’t going to be able to do the hutch/bureau thing after all. Then Kristen called and sensibly reminded me to check craigslist. Because golly, we prefer cheap used stuff–it makes us less furious with the kids when they inevitably trash it. After a couple days of checking, I found this in our price range. And the lady delivered it yesterday for just an extra $10.
The only think I’m not super excited about is the glass doors–I know they’ll be covered with fingerprints nonstop, and my well organized bins of school and art supplies look pretty messy from the side, but all in all, I’m pretty happy. My cookbooks have room to spread, I can get my magazine basket off the floor and out of reach, the record player has a new home (we repurposed its old stand to use in our bedroom), the records are safe behind a door that we can safety latch shut so that Tommy isn’t pulling out Keith Green and Jerry Vale and strewing them about the house, the random office stuff is organized and hidden from view in the drawers, and the bottom drawer serves as a home for our plethora of coloring books and crayons. Tommy’s oversized coloring books even fit nearly out of sight underneath! I ran out of kitchen drawers for my placemats, so they’re hanging out above the records, and I even have a nice little mantle for some of our family pictures (I think the tall ones will be moving once we hang pictures on the wall above).
So until my mom comes to help make the final push, I’m going to concentrate on this one little spot of organization and choose not to focus on the chaos surrounding it!
wow! Almost makes me excited to move and organize again in a few months…ALMOST but not really!