Garage Alcove

I always thought that hiring a professional organizer to help us do something we could do ourselves was sort of a stupid idea.  Until I was so enraged by the clutter that I just didn't care anymore.

It has been a very good thing for us.  It's forcing us to really deal with all the crap in our house and get our "homework" done each week.  We're now being held accountable to someone else, as well as to our wallet!

The other reason I feel good about paying someone else to come into our house and tell us things like, "I should just shoot you now and put you out of your misery." (seriously, she said that to us...  right after we told her that we actually take our pile of accumulated mail on vacation with us so that we can go through it all while driving across country.  And you have to admit, she's kind of got a point...) is because she took one look in our second-pantry-thing and said, "You need more shelves in here."  And then the next time she came back, she had three different types of shelving units and we chose which one should go in there and it's now a much better organized second-pantry-thing.

She also took one look into our garage-storage-alcove-thing and said, "You could fit some shelves back there."  And so we went and bought some cheap shelves from Lowe's and installed them.  And it's awesome.

Garage Alcove

This coming Friday, we asked the organizer not to come, though, so that we can spend the weekend purging all the stuff that has accumulated in the downstairs room.  We're also going to go through the kids' bedroom this weekend and purge a bunch of their old toys.  They're actually looking forward to it.  It seems de-cluttering and enjoying the feeling of clean is contagious.  :)