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 [...]]]> 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.

The deadline in question was the final critique for my art class, a self-directed painting [...]]]> I haven’t been blogging much lately.  My offline life has been pretty hectic, as I mentioned in last week.  But I got through a great big deadline yesterday, so I hope to get back to blogging, organizing, and blogging about organizing.

The deadline in question was the final critique for my art class, a self-directed painting seminar in which the students basically pursue their own projects, only with the advantage of structure, feedback, and people to commiserate with.  It’s perfect for someone like me — I have an MFA, and while my draftsmanship leaves something to be desired, I don’t really need drawing and painting classes that focus on the basics.  As much as I love making art, though, I find that I don’t tend to do it unless I have some sort of structure supporting me.  I need to know that someone will be looking at what I make, that my teachers and classmates will wander over and check out where I’m taking my work.  Even if they don’t give me feedback, even if I ignore the feedback they do give me, the conversations inspire me to keep the art happening.

Which brings me to the end of class, which brings me to the state of my studio space:

The Artist's Studio, With Ladybug Cookie

I was working on three large projects at once, and ran out of room on my table, which was covered in jars of medium, pigment, collage materials, and my lap top, which I have to move whenever I work. So I grabbed an end table from the living room to work on (it cleverly nests under another end table most of the time, so I didn’t even have to clear crap off it first!). That end table wound up with jars of paint all over it (as well as my Spring Cleaning Ritual Candles and Feast, consisting of a cookie shaped like a ladybug). But since it was a small table, and the piece I was working on was large, there are also jars of paint all over the floor, and stacks of National Geographics everywhere, and other random art supplies, as well as a handful of books, and receipts, and other random things.  Seriously, you can walk in here without slipping on the slick surface of a National Geographic.

Only this isn’t the scary part.  This is the scary part:

It just keeps getting worse ...

I know … it looks much better than the first picture.  There are no bottles of paint, jars of medium, collage materials, tottering piles of National Geographics, or random bits of laundry.  But under that big brown piece of paper lurks … paperwork.

That’s right.  My studio, messy as it looks, was reorganized last Spring.  I created a system that’s basically functional.  The only thing I have to do is clear the table, clean the floor, and put things away.

But the kitchen table … that’s another story.

The kitchen table has a backstory.  You see, my partner and I are barbarians who tend to eat in front of the TV instead of at the kitchen table like civilized folk.  This is due in part to the fact that we like to watch TV.   But it’s also due to the fact that the kitchen table tends to become a workspace, whether I want it to be or not.  A few years ago I finally decided to own this; Stuart and I got a nice big coffee table for the living room, and we just eat dinner in there.

With the intent of using the kitchen table to expand my workspace, I was used it as a staging area during last year’s massive Spring Cleaning and reorganization project.  I took everything off the shelves in my art studio, spread them on the kitchen table, sorted them, and put them away.  Then I took everything off the nearby kitchen and pantry shelves, spread them on the kitchen table, sorted them, and put them away.  Then I got distracted.

The tiny pile of “homeless” items remained on my kitchen table.  Then it metastasized.  It acquired other homeless items as the months went on.  The scariest part is that it became a repository for my business receipts and paperwork … and those items are homeless because I don’t have a filing system set up yet, which means that I really need to bite the bullet and create a filing system.  This is going to be the biggest challenge of my organizing transformation.  Wish me luck.