PROGRESS REPORT:

I’ve just completed week three (of six) of the organizing workshop. As you can see, my organization efforts are still running behind! I think I was waiting for my space to be perfect before sharing it. Then I realized that I’d be waiting a really long time, put off blog posts, and leave you all with nothing new to read when you stop by for weeks on end. Apparently, waiting until it’s perfect is a paralyzing organizing roadblock for me. I have accomplished sorting various junk drawers and even clearing out a mega-sized drawer to hide my paper and cardboard recycling – the basket full of it out in the open was starting to make me not want to recycle any more! It’s crazy how happy this has made me. The feeling of accomplishment that comes with these little projects is wonderful.

I am finding that having organization on the brain is leading to other projects and simple fixes that I had been ignoring for a long time. For instance, my beloved Dyson vacuum had lost all of its sucking mojo. I finally did some hardcore taking-apart of the appliance and found there was a pen stuck in there and all kinds of things were stuck around it, blocking all of the air. I finally had my beloved but filthy with construction dust and pollen screened-in porch powerwashed, removed all of the furniture for a scrub-down, washed all of my pillow covers and got a new rug for out there. I found a bored friend to hang the shelves my office had been crying out for, so without further ado:

BEFORE (EWWWW! I could not get ANY work done in here because it was so distractingly gross and ugly):

You may recognize my map wall. It had seen better days; the sun had faded the once-lovely blue to a depressing gray. Yuck. Actually, it had been replaced by my horrible D.I.Y. disaster inspiration board, but that thing has bitten the dust as well. I cannot seem to find a good inspiration board solution. I need to go re-read my post comments because I know you all gave me some great suggestions.

IN PROGRESS:

What I have left to do:

1) Find the perfect labels for those pails so I’ll know which one to pull down. They contain all of my drafting supplies which were formerly in that little chest of drawers in the BEFORE picture. The chest was great for my station in grad school, but it had just become clunky junky in my current office. I think it would be a cute nightstand in a future dream beach house I don’t own, so I’m storing it in the attic for now. Oh, those are paint tins from Home Depot, I think they cost about $1 each. They come in a bunch of different sizes and they are great for hiding a multitude of sins.

2) Sort whatever the heck is in this tin.

3) I feel like this is sort of wasted space, but I don’t want to fill it just because I have it. Look it how gross it got in the BEFORE shot. For now, I’m going to enjoy the empty space it adds to my flow. Hopefully this wastebasket is not in my feng shui financial corner or something (wasn’t that in Bridget Jones’ Diary? She was basically letting her finances get tossed out with the garbage, according to a feng shui article in one of her glossies. I have much bigger issues to deal with before I can even think about adding feng shui complications!).

4) I just threw extra office supplies on this shelf. I need to get it looking nicer or it’s going to bug me. That Staples box of envelopes is too ugly to be out. These are the kinds of details that bug me.

I have to give another shoutout to my Organizing 101 Workshop. It’s part practical organizing, part figuring out the psychology of why my house gets to a certain point of disarray, like why I shop too much, why my clutter builds up, etc.! There’s also a great forum of people going through the same thing to chat and commiserate with – it is really motivating and it’s well worth the $75 price tag.

When I’m all done, I’m going to do something crazy. I’m probably going to have to take it all down because I HATE that ten year old Restoration Hardware soft green, and I’d like to wallpaper. However, by the time I’m done, I should have a system, and I’ll take pictures so I will know where to put everything back up, right? Another one of my roadblocks is finding out my pain in the butt limits – I ordered some samples, picked one, tried to get two different people in the know to refer a good wallpaper hanger, they didn’t know any, and I stopped trying! However, I have been in touch with a great painter. Perhaps I should just stick with him and keep things simple. Sorry, if any of you are still actually reading this, I think I’m working through my own personal organization/project completion limitations through this blog and boring you with it! Hmmm, what color, what color…hmmm, time to distract myself with June’s Coastal Living, Elle Decor, and Southern Living, all of which are sitting right in front of me at the moment, then make a field trip to Benjamin Moore…

At first, Gwenyth Paltrow’s website, GOOP, annoyed me to no end. I don’t know why, because I really like her – as an actress, she seems really cool, and one time on Oprah she described a hilarious teenage prank she and her friend played on Arnold Schwartzenegger when he lived next door to her family and it’s made me like her ever since. But GOOP seemed so pretentious and name-droppy. However, since then I have heard her explain that she has been able to do a lot of extraordinary things in her life, and wants to share what she finds out with her friends and anyone else who wants to know as well, so I’m softening on the whole GOOP thing, sitting back, and enjoying the newsletters. Unless they have to do with Tracy Anderson – those just make me feel irrationally bad that I am not size 00 and that I don’t survive on fish and kale.

Today there is a post about how Annette Joseph renovated Gwynnie’s temporary apartment in Nashville that was really fun to read – the apartment was ripped down to a shell, rebuilt and re-decorated in TEN DAYS! The only thing I don’t like are those cheap knockoffs from the discount website – if I’m going to get an iconic chair, I’m not going to settle for some Canal Streetish wannabe, copycat version of it, I’m going to save and save and get the one that’s really special. Wow, I ‘m just full of personal opinions in this quick link post, perhaps I should just give you the link and shut the heck up! Here’s a teaser, starring a sofa from Blu Dot:

I first encountered the work of Pam Longobardi when I came across this sculpture she created in collaboration with Joe Peragine and Craig Dongoski about a mile from my house. It’s called The Water Bottle Art Project:

I then came across her in the Atlantan, who describes her much better than I can:

Not content to just observe, Atlanta artist, Georgia State Professor and avid surfer Pam Longobardi acts. She crafts powerful artworks from the soup of plastic waste she finds floating in enormous trash islands or washed up on beaches, bringing them into the white box settings of international galleries.

If eco art is your thing, I have a feeling her upcoming book will be one you will want for your shelves. It comes out this fall, but you can pre-order it here. To see more of her Drifters Project, click here.

Today Show aired a segment on furniture and other items that can grow with your child. Two DwellStudio products were featured in that segment: Baby Storage Bins and Baby Soft Blocks. They’re not just for kids anymore!

Do you recognize this loft from the crappy picture I took of my television over the weekend?

Here’s another clue:

Tom Hanks’ loft in the movie “Big” is one of the best, most fun set designs I’ve ever seen. It still stands up today. The guy’s got a Pepsi machine, a pinball machine, blow up dinosaurs, bunk beds, and best of all, a trampoline. That would surely require some really high ceilings and some sneaking in past the co-op board!

Sometimes I think we all take design too seriously. Sometimes I look at it so much that I get burnt out. Then I watch a movie like “Big” and start to think about lightening things up and approaching design like a kid, and I’m reinvigorated.