half done is good enough

I'm lazy. Real lazy. Like really really really lazy. I don't clean, I stack. Ryan too. We're Stackers. Everything in our house is in little piles all over the place. A stack of junk mail, a stack of bills, a stack of comic books - or several stacks of comic books - stacks of shoes, piles of coats... we're a mess, basically. So when people are coming (especially with short notice - DON'T), we tend to grab a few stacks and throw them into the office and slam the door shut before the avalanche can come down and bury us. This has been the way we've handled "cleaning" for the past couple of months - make a stack until the stack is unmanageable, then toss it into the office. Good riddance. So the office is a disaster.

Or, it was a disaster. Yesterday I got this bug up my butt about organizing the office. That the office was the linchpin of the rest of the untidiness! If the office was clean, then everything else would fall into place! True or false, this is what I believed. So. I drew up a floor plan in PowerPoint (shut up!) and I played with moving the furniture around on my little template (shut UP!) and then I made a plan of attack. I decided what we needed was a bed. A guest bed. YES. A guest bed will solve it all. Take up most of the office space, give us a place to host overnighters and it will be a No Stacking Zone. I went on Craigslist and immediately procured a futon, which we're picking up tomorrow. So last night I spent the whole night with the stacks and piles and pushed them all around so that I could move the furniture. It was ridiculous and kind of awesome. Now the office is the cleanest spot in our house (which ain't saying much, trust me). There is a wide area of exposed carpet instead of stacks. I took off the closet doors and was able to use the deep closet space for extra storage and organization (what?). The desk has been retrofitted to be more user friendly (thanks to a screwgun and a couple tricky maneuvers). A new desk chair (via Craigslist) will be coming in a couple of days. I'm talking to some repair dude (again, Craigslist) to figure out what it will cost to repair our giant copy machine* and then I will probably make a work area for that inside the closet too.

I've done all that I can do for the moment and it's really only half done. There's only one (crappy) light in there and once the futon is in, I need blankets and sheets and pillows pillows pillows. Plus a side table and a little fan and maybe an alarm clock and... and... and...

And yet, it feels awesome. Half-done feels SO good. I could bask in the glory of half-done for a good long time. So when you come to visit in July or November, don't be surprised when the TV still hasn't been plugged in or the futon is disassembled in the living room with stacks of jackets on it. I'll still be riding the high from the half-cleaned office.


*we have a full sized office copier that was a remnant from my mom's office so that Ryan can make his copies for work (at 20 cents a page at Kinkos, it adds up. Trust me. We spend HUNDREDS and sometimes thousands of dollars a year at Kinkos. LAME).