Minimalist Monday Mission: Declutter 365 – Office Storage

By simplify, on April 4th, 2011

Minimalist Monday Mission

This week for Minimalist Monday Mission: Declutter 365 I was working on my office storage area!

After I completed the bookshelves last week, that left one more major area in my office: the built-in storage area.

I am blessed to have a big office and it came with some wonderful built-in storage cabinets that line one of the walls. In the middle of the room, we also have a desk for my children. However, both areas had been run over with a bunch of stuff. The problem with the built-in storage area and the desk are the same…they are both flat surfaces.

I’m convinced that flat surfaces are just magnets for junk!

So, the first order of business was to clean up the small desk. Here’s what it looked like before:

And then I was able to see the desk again afterward:

Having just cleaned out the bookshelves last week, I now had an entire shelf to allocate to art supplies

Then it was on to the storage area itself. There are three main sections. Here’s what they looked like before:

And after:

And here’s a picture of the entire area as a whole. I just love it when I can see flat surfaces don’t you?? Ahhh…peaceful

I also cleaned up my couch in the office as well. Here’s the before:

And after:

I hope to move it downstairs once we sell the couch that’s currently downstairs.

After this clean up, and it was a massive event (hence the post here on Monday evening at 10 pm), I have a TON of things that will be donated or listed for sale soon. There was actually so many things out of this storage area that will be donated or sold, it made me think of the saying, “Out of sight, out of mind”. That was really true here. I came across so much that I no longer needed. It was like the decluttering jackpot

I’m thinking I need a week just to list everything or haul it off to Goodwill, so the plan for next week is to finish the office, list the items for sale, and take a Goodwill run. So, you will see that the numbers for donations and sales this week were both low, but the amount recycled and trashed was really high. That’s mainly because I haven’t categorized everything I eliminated yet.

Now there are just three things left in my office: 1) the desktop, which I purposely saved until last, because it’s been temporarily housing things along the way, 2) the process of digitizing documents, and 3) the computer paraphernalia box that I need help going through:

I am so close to finishing this room that I can taste the victory (and can certainly see a major impact here). I’m hoping to finish up this week (although I may save the digitizing until later…)! And I also have a massive overflowing box of paper to be shredded (despite the fact that I have been shredding daily!).

Total of items eliminated this week?

Threw out/Recycled: 111 items
Donated/Given: 0 items
Sold: 11 items from my Becoming Minimalist Sale, Craig’s List, Amazon, or eBay (listed a few things on eBay that sold this week)