Well, I did it. After a year of allowing my kitchen table to become submerged under an ever-growing pile of random clutter, I finally reclaimed it:
It's a work table with work on it, even.
This is exactly the kind of work I need to be able to do on this table. I have a large piece of handmade paper with flowers pressed into it, but it’s so delicate that the flowers are in constant danger of coming off. I need to put down a layer of medium to make sure they stay put.
Here’s what the table looked like when I began:
Kitchen Table, Before
I started by separating everything into piles on the floor according to my categories. I discovered that I had five categories: art supplies, medications and first aid, cooking utensils, stuff to go upstairs, and papers to be filed. Since the rest of my home is pretty organized, dealing with these categories was pretty straightfoward — art supplies were put away in the studio area, first aid stuff in the medicine cabinet, and cooking utensils in the kitchen drawers.
The “upstairs” stuff had been the pebble that started the landslide, way back last Spring. I have a bunch of knick-knacks and stuff that I have no place to display, so I’m keeping them in a closet upstairs for now. For whatever reason, when I reorganized my studio last Spring, I didn’t ever get around to putting them away. As a result, the table started attracting random crap, and the situation snowballed.
This is an object lesson for a treacherous part of the organizing process. You see, by the time you’re about 90% done with your organizing project, you will stop, and you will take a look at what’s left to do. You will think to yourself, “I’m almost done. I’m tired, and I’m bored, and I’ll just finish this tomorrow.”
Well, don’t, because you won’t. You’ll forget about it, and pretty soon your chaos will be like you never tried to tame it. So learn from my sorry tale, kids, finish the job the first time.