We had a friend over for dinner last week. I made pasties, salad and lemon cake. Not fancy, but definitely delicious.

It was a good friend so I didn’t really need to get everything perfect for the occasion, but that day was Clean ALL the Things so the house looked pretty good.

Puggle photobomb

The new vanity! That works! And doesn’t leak!

I was pretty proud of myself for getting everything all cleaned up enough to have people over and take pictures less than a week after making the house a certified disaster area via the baking of thousands of dog treats and being away at the show during both days last weekend.

And then I went into the office to get something and I remembered. Oh yeah, I just shoved everything in there and was pretending that it didn’t exist.

Seriously though? When you have to climb over a box full of 50 pounds of flour, the dining room table leaf, the stuff from the bathroom vanity that you have to sort through and put back plus half a dozen half-finished craft projects that you can’t see in this photo because it’s too embarrassing just to get to the box containing the printer paper? I took this picture from the doorway because that’s about as far as I could get. Yeah, something must be done. I’d been putting off an office overhaul since April and it had only gotten worse. Last Friday was the day.

I pulled everything out of the office (all the stuff on the floor anyway) and organized it, throwing out three trash bags worth of stuff, consolidating other stuff and then putting it all back. Here’s where I ended up.

Another puggle photobomb

So, yeah, we have kind of a problem. See all that stuff on the right piled in front of and top of the bookcases? Business stuff. See all that stuff there on the left on the floor? Business stuff. See that shelf with all the gaming books on it? Sagging.

Business stuff mostly

Now I’m not sure what to do. We clearly need more storage in there. We clearly need to replace that bookshelf. But it’s going to have to do for now because at least I can see the floor! My problem is that I am totally ready to do something about the rest of that stuff. Initially I was thinking a 5×5 Expedit bookcase, or perhaps two, but I’m not sure that would actually solve the problem. Plus there’s the issue that we are now storing two coolers that I am using for dog treat shows.

Chester regards the pile of stuff suspiciously

Chester regards me suspiciously: “You really think you can organize this? HAH!”

It’s basically a storage room, but we do need to be able to use the floor for projects like painting the kitchen cabinets (shhh…that’s coming).

Does anyone have any ideas? Are you tackling any organizational projects yourself?