OFFENDING HOME OFFICE: PART 12

While I’m still sorting out paper work let me take this time to mention culling out computer files while you are organizing your home office as well.  This project can be done doing rest periods while you are at the computer and in the long run will simplify your life even more.

If you happen to be at your computer take a time to look at your file folders.  Do you still need the book report Johnny Jr wrote for his third grade class?  After all he is graduating this year.

Or copies of warranty papers for items that have long since gone the way of the do-do bird?

Or the really hard one.  All those blurry vacation photos you took five years ago that you can’t even remember what highway you were on or why you thought you could snap a photo out of a car window as you went speeding down the interstate at 75 mph?

Or if you are a mystery shopper, you only have to keep copies of your photos and paperwork for 99.99% of the companies you work for a maximum of 6 months, most are 6 weeks, the max is one year.  All those copies take up a lot of space on your computer.  I know, I know,  out of sight, out of mind.

If culling files makes you EXTREMELY nervous, then back it all up before you start and then once you are satisfied you have cleaned it up and everything valuable is saved, back it up again. 

Having them gone will make finding the right warranty paper even faster if you don’t have to look under computer and discover you have warranty papers in there for five different computers to find the right one—you really should be able to tell by the purchase date on the file.  

You may want to reorganize or re-label some of those files too.  How about combining files?  

When I was working on the photo segment of my computer I discovered I actually had photos in two different main segments of it.  Not sure how that happened, but it did. Most likely because I created a file after my husband already had and I didn’t know he had.

 Worse yet I found I had photos of my son in three different folders labeled just enough different it made it very hard for me to find the exact photo I wanted when I wanted it. By combining all those photos into one folder, with subfolders for various events I no longer had to do a system wide search for the exact photo I knew I had, but had a dickens of a time finding it.

This combining of files speeds up scrapping tremendously.

A side note here on photos, especially old family photos.  Don’t be afraid to pull them into a photo editor and tweak them a bit.  Save a copy of the original, and mark it as such.  Then work some photoshop magic and you might just be delighted in what you find.

A prime example of this was an old black and white photo my husband’s aunt gave me of various generations of his ancestry.  The photo was badly faded, tattered and not real clear, but Gary worked computer magic with it and not only did he sharpen it to the condition we could easily see family similarities he discovered a small boy peaking around the edge of a quilt that had been hung as a backdrop for the photo.

When he asked his aunt if she knew who it was she was VERY excited.  She named the uncle and said that was the only photo to her knowledge of him. So save a copy of the original, but have some fun with the computer copies and you just might find treasure as well.

While you are at it, how many photos are on your phone, your tablet, or your camera memory card you’ve been meaning to transfer?  Do it now, get them filed and then when you are ready to scrapbook you can print exactly when you want easily and perfectly without a all out manhunt through all those different pieces of equipment.  Don’t forget other family member’s devices while you are at it. 

Just like paper clutter there is no reason to keep excess clutter on your computer, eventually too much on there could possibly slow the system down.  So purge files.  Then empty your trash bin.

Once you’ve done that if your computer doesn’t automatically compact files, do a compact files, defrag the computer, and while you are at it run a complete scan of the computer.

Then back it all up, off the computer if at all possible.  Just in case lightening fries your computer.

While this project won’t remove actual physical clutter from your home or office it will remove it from your life and simplify your searches in the future.

Jan who really did find some very, very old files from when a friend was in college and she did some typing for him in OK

OFFENDING HOME OFFICE: PART 2

Well that day or two some how rolled into other S.H.E. projects and here it is February 2014.  Some additional progress has been made here and there between this and that last update, but nothing to write home about.

So two days ago I started challenging myself to get after the “pretty-up” work.  Meaning the nuts and bolts organizing of the office.  There are still some big things to remove from the room entirely, but the guys will deal with that, because it’s their stuff.  

Detail work is my job.  So I set a goal, one organized, clean-up project per day.  No excuses.  I of course have started with my area, because the guys are still sorting their big stuff out. I also know more what I want.  

For my birthday and Christmas the guys gave me some great equipment to work on the card business with and I of course have hit a sale or two to get the small “go withs” sticking very carefully to my $50 per month budget for such purchases. 

Bringing new things into the craft room/office made me more determined to be organized with it so I could use it easily.  So I started there.

The new machine was a Cuttlebug, which is a hand cranked embossing machine.  It uses embossing folders and die cuts. I also received two of the We  R Memory Keepers Punch and Score Boards  So I needed a safe, organized way to not only store these gifts, but it needed to be easy to use and to get to.

It was my dear husband, Gary,  that came up with the storage box for the folders and eventually the dies, once I purchase some.  It is a repurposed item, which is wonderful.  We had it already, even better.  In fact we have several of them, best! That means as my collection of folders grows so can my file system.

Those of you who were adults in the 80’s will remember Flip and File storage boxes for computer discs.  

By changing the direction of the filing system from front to back to lengthwise my embossing folders fit in perfectly.  Even better we still had the keys to lock these containers so when we start traveling with retirement I can safely take the boxes along and not worry about spillage. 

These folders come in various sizes, I currently only have the 5 X 7, the A-2 and border folders and not many of those.  So one box works well for all of them and the pressure plates as well. 

I wanted them to be very organized and easy to find and use.  So I first sorted them by size so smaller folders wouldn’t get lost between bigger ones and then wrote on each one with a permanent marker it the name for it.  

Next I sorted each size grouping by type. Celebrations, fauna, flora, shapes, textures etc.

Since index cards don’t normally come in the sizes I needed for this project I created my own using previously owned poster board (I’m all about recycling you know and one side was still clean) and one of my other new pieces of equipment a We R Memory Keepers Envelope Punch and Score Board. 

 There are numerous utube videos on how to do this, just use the search terms “envelope punch board file folder”.  I just made dividers not folders to conserve space.  I also made each divider approximately ½ “ taller than each embossing folder, by the way I laid the folders on their long edge to get them to fit in the box perfectly. The photo below is pretty self explanatory if you don't want to mess with utube.  You use the punch lined up the way you see it to cut one side of the tab, then line it up on the opposite side at the length you want and use a straight edge to cut off the excess.

I file to the front so once the dividers were made it was a fast thing to insert them where they belonged.

Because I have so few folders right now there was plenty of room to put my plates for the Cuttlebug in the front of the box.  So everything fit nice and tidy.

Due to the massive culling we did I still had an empty bookshelf to put this box and Cuttlebug on, along with my Punch and Score Boards.  As I may in the future need to add other boxes due to adding an abundance of folders and dies the shelf is deep enough I could turn the two largest items at 90 degrees and easily put more boxes on the shelf.  See the photo on the side.

So that bit of organization was accomplished on the first day of my self challenge.

Jan who says now she knows here folders won’t get bent and she can do any embossing project quickly in OK.

OFFENDING HOME OFFICE:PART I

Or any office for that matter.  If  you have an office you have the possibility of massive paper clutter, lost files, disappearing desktops, computers burdened with excessive files. If it is also the center of your crafting, as is ours, then it adds even more clutter to the mayhem. 

Ours was even worse it had been a collection point for things that were to be put up for sale, in fact when we started this project we hadn’t actually been in that room for a few years for more than a very short period to “store” something else in there. As a result we were near the “goat trails” syndrome in the room.Trying to work in there would be miserable because this is an upstairs room that is toward the end of the duct work for the furnace and air conditioning.  There are also no windows, just a sliding glass door.  The number of days anyone could comfortably work in there were therefore limited in number.

We started on this room in June of 2012, then it got hot, very, very hot.  Yet we doggedly worked at in on and off through the hot summer and almost comfortable fall to slowly weed things out.  

The room had eight years of mystery shopping paperwork in it.  Anyone who does mystery shopping will tell you it creates cases and cases of paperwork for just one person and there had been three of us shopping at one point.  There was also paperwork from various businesses we have ran over the years so just the paperwork alone required burning numerous feed sacks full of non-essential paperwork.  We burn here because we are allowed to and it really stops a potential identity thief in their tracks.  Stirred up ashes are really hard to get information off of.

Then there were the stacks of boxes of things “for sale”.  The Webfoot Tub Designs materials and much more.  

The room was totally out of control.  So was the temperature in there.  It was just too hot to get it cleaned out, but we doggedly kept at it a little at a time, between everything else that filled our always busy plates.

We each chose a section to work on and used the following sorting method:

1.     Keep, you better have a very, very, very good reason for keeping it.  We might need it some day did not qualify. We had to have an IMMEDIATE need for it.  When in doubt throw it out! The only exception, of course, was tax records.

2.     Donate, good enough to sell, only we were NOT going to be the ones selling it. Local charities would benefit from our need to clean and organize.

3.     Recycle.  This included anything we could recycle from corrugated cardboard to old electronics.

4.     Burnable trash-this was all those years worth of paperwork from mystery shopping we did not need for tax purposes.

5.     Non-burn.  This was loaded up and taken to the dump as soon as we had a complete truck load. 

By the holiday season we had enough cleaned out we could safely put a space heater in there while we worked, so a lot of progress was made.  We hauled pick-up loads of “for sale” items to the donation boxes rather than to continue to hang on to things to list “some day.”  

Two runs to the dump, and hours at the burn barrel as we continued to work.  Because of who we are (humans) we of course did not work non-stop.  After all it was the holiday season. 

Soon the room was clear enough that we started converting this storage room back to an office.  Our goal was to create three work stations, one for each of us. It is a very large room that could easily be divided up.  

The two men built one computer from scratch, and Frankensteined two others for that room.  Each of us would have our own to work with.  We would also each have the type of work area we needed for our individual needs.  

Sean is working on a graphic novel, so he needed a drafting board and a flat table to work with along with his computer.  The men stopped cleaning to build the easel for the drafting board and the three computers.  I plugged away slowly for awhile, but then became a S.H.E.

For those of you who don’t know what a S.H.E. is it’s a Sidetracked Home Executive.  This is not an original thought.  It is actually from the book  “Side TrackedHome Executives from Pigpen to Paradise” by Pam Young and Peggy Jones.   A very good home organization how to book that I read years ago and recently re-read to review.

The acronym says it all.  I got sidetracked.  Oh I planned on finishing up the office right then, it was actually down to the “pretty up” stage, almost.  But then that avalanche of cans from the pantry fell on my feet and I pitched such a fit we three decided it was time to get the pantry under control.  So we abandoned the office project to tame the Pantry Monster. Which of course segued into Corralling my cupboards. I told you I was a S.H.E.

Our logic was we used the pantry daily, the office we had done without for years.  So what was a little longer before it got completed. It was after all straightened enough Sean could work in there on his graphic novel and artwork.

So we started trying to tame the Pantry Monster,  that project drug on and I got side tracked in the middle of it by what to do with all my spices and ended up Corralling my Cupboards before I could slay the Pantry Monster.  

Now that both of those projects are completed I’m back to working on the office, in mid June a year later. Guess what it was HOT again.  Only this time we were prepared and purchased a portable air conditioning unit that could be vented out the sliding glass door.  

So it was time to stop stalling and finish this room.  After all I was over one year behind on my total clean-out of the kingdom, which makes me that much more determined.  There is still a lot to do not only in the office, but in various other rooms and outbuildings.  Although we have made a lot of progress I still had a long journey ahead of me to achieve the Princess Plan.

First of course I had to get a little sidetracked for a day or two.  Uploading blogs, tidying up the main downstairs rooms and working on our new family evening plans…yet another blog post to work on.  Not to mention gardening.  Excuses, excuses.

The truth was there was so much left in the office I hadn’t a clue what to do with I was stalling.  I had to force myself to really settle down and sort by the five boxes we had previously worked with.  Some places to clean are simply harder than others to clean.

This room was one of those.  It had been simply a storage room for so long and until we purchased the air conditioner it had been too hot to work in there most of the year I just had trouble getting enthusiastic about it.

This worried me greatly because I knew the basement and sunroom still lay ahead of me, both were basically storage rooms at that point as well.  These would be followed by all the out buildings and that was downright scary.  We are determined though.  So onward and upward. Time drags on…

What follows is a series of posts that will go up about every two days documenting the journey from the photo on the side, to a clean and organized room. We are REALLY doing it.

Jan who is determined that room will be organized sooner or later.