One of my mother’s favorite saying is “making little ones out of big ones.” This is when your intended task of taking care of something large or involved, be it cleaning the house, filing paperwork, doing laundry, etc, turns into an exercise where you “organize” the task into several more manageable “sub-tasks,” if you will. The organizing into smaller bits takes so much time and energy that soon you run out of time and you’re still left with just the same amount of work, but it just looks a little different. The same also applies if you have so much to do that you don’t know where to start, so you just shuffle things from one pile to another without really accomplishing anything.
Making little ones out of big ones.
Yesterday, I did the opposite. I made a huge gigantic one out of a very tiny one. There are many thoughts and events leading up to this, so it wasn’t completely out of the blue, but basically what my Saturday boiled down to was that I didn’t have a good place to put my printer, so I rearranged everything in my entire bedroom to make a place for it. We’re talking every piece of furniture, most of the things on the walls, many of my nick-knacks, and basically my entire library. Just so there was an adequate, non-cluttered place for the printer to sit.
If you give a mouse a cookie.
Mouse, here.
And even though I used more than 6 hours of my day that I’d intended to use elsewhere and I’m quite sore from lugging some heavy furniture around all by myself, I’m more than pleased with the result. I was content with my bedroom before, but now I REALLY like it. I like to think that I’ve inherited my mother’s natural ability to create warm, inviting, comforting spaces, and I think I’ve accomplished that with this room. It’s so “me.”
I have a relatively cozy room, nice place to spend time, and the energy worked just fine for me. I love all the personal touches and pictures of friends and loved ones. I don’t like stuff in my room that has no meaning or no sentimental value, so really everything in it has either been given to me by someone I love or has a story behind it. I don’t like to have things just to have things. To me, that’s clutter.
But there was no place to put the printer.
Here’s where we started:
So I started by just scooting the mattress in front of the window to see if I’d like it, and although at the beginning I was iffy, I just went for it. The mess was inevitable. In order to move the dresser by myself, I had to take all the drawers out. To move the bookshelves, I had to remove the books. For everything. Dresser, desk, two bookshelves, nightstand. So basically I had a large pile of drawers and furniture and bedding (I’d put all the sheets in the wash during this process) sitting on top of my mattress. I vacuumed under vacant surfaces as I went along, because really, how often do you get to vacuum under your dresser? It just made sense. About two hours into it, I wondered if this was really a good idea. Here’s why:
But in the end, I love it. Now the whole room has a more open feel, it’s all vacuumed and dusted and clean feeling, and most importantly, there’s a good place for my printer. Now I can set up my business life in a place that makes sense.
Best of all, this little project cost me nothing, as I already had everything that I used. And now the room has a brand new, fresh feel to it– love that! I’ll tell a little about some of my favorite things pictured in this post later as this was just a vague overview of the overall process.
Next up: bathroom and closet.
