what a mess! (room re-do in progress)

For those who know me, whenever I'm not traveling for work, out and about, or in front of my computer, it seems like I'm always "cleaning my room." How can said single room of no more than a couple hundred square feet be so chronically messy?

After moving back home after college, I combined an apartment full of clothes, school supplies, and other trinkets into my childhood bedroom. Still, I continued to accumulate additional things (including clothes for work, casual, and J-fashion), knick knacks I received for volunteering at events, and souvenirs. Somewhere along the line, Dearie was born and I learned to buy craft supplies in bulk. The rest is history.



Above: What a (messy) headache.
(In the midst of cleaning and re-organizing)
December 2011

So although I consider myself a relatively neat person, I eventually had stuff toppling over more stuff stacked on more stuff. Though everything had a "place," having craft supplies lining the floor of my room in boxes was still not ideal. Last September, when my parents decided to renovate the house, I was forced to pack everything into boxes and bags. Despite the upstairs living area being restored back to liveable condition months ago, I've still continued to live out of boxes simply because I haven't figured out where to unpack everything in an organized manner.





Above: It looks like trash, but it's really a bunch of trinkets that I probably don't remember owning in the first place.

In the past two months (and a good chunk of time during this weekend), I've sorted, donated, re-organized, re-purposed, and re-evaluated everything that I own. The end result included selling and donating a bunch of things that I came to realize that I can live without. A good way to determine what could go was deciding whether I remembered that I owned an item when I was away for work. If not, then time to donate or sell.

After numerous weekends on and off, as well as this weekend, I'm glad to say that I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. And with some investment at Container Store and IKEA, I finally see the semblance of an organized bed/craft room rather than a heap of clutter.

I'm hoping that within the next two months, I can finally reveal my newly organized and decorated abode without being embarrassed.

Let's hope this happens before I end up potentially moving out for school!

P.S. To Rebecca - Google Analytics says I have one visitor from Japan so I assume this is you. I am sorry this post is rather administrative in purpose and not interesting to say the least. I promise it will be interesting when I use it to premise how awesome and clean my room looks now. A clean room after 6 months is a happy Lauren. I feel so proud of my efforts that I decided to write this post, despite it being 12:37 AM and having to wake up at 5:30 AM to travel to the valley again. Good night.