daydreams & the former me.

I took this week off work. No particular reason, aside from my occasional need to walk away and recharge, but it's the perfect opportunity to start diving into the organizational nightmare that is Turning the Yellow Bedroom into a Nursery. (Yes, I do spend all my time off organizing. Yes I do.)

Of course, when I took time off work last spring, it was warm enough to paint the kitchen cabinets; this year, we've hardly cracked 50 degrees on any given day. So much for my theory that Ann Arbor is always in bloom by the time University of Michigan graduation rolls around (third week in April). Wonk-wonk. IT USUALLY IS, OKAY? Anyway, since anything under about 65 degrees is considered freezing in my book, I've been holed up inside, playing organizational dominoes.

The first domino is the future nursery, AKA The Baby's Crib. At about 10' x 11', the yellow room is our smallest bedroom - definitely smaller than the master bedroom and the guest room. When we moved in (almost four years ago! Whaaa?!), we couldn't even venture a guess as to how we were going to use THREE BEDROOMS, plus a living room, a garage, a basement....As adults, we'd only inhabited apartments, and we didn't have enough furniture to fill three bedrooms.

We stuck the futon in there and called it a day (and later took down the stained drapes and painted the walls yellow). Fast-forward almost four years, and it's been reinvented as an office, a temporary nursery for my niece, and a What-Do-We-Do-With-This;-I-Don't-Know-Stick-It-In-The-Yellow-Room room. Especially after we turned the guest room closet into our office, the smallest bedroom became a dumping ground for everything from coursepacks to comic books, crafting crap to keyboards. 

Taking a 360-view of the room...

The little bookshelf houses my grad school binders and textbooks;
that chair is never sat in anymore; that fan is broken...

Haven't touched the keyboard in years...the tall bookshelf holds my undergrad
textbooks and grad school coursepacks...that big dresser is EMPTY...

And the fourth wall is pretty much useless, since it's a wall of doors.

I've kept all my school books, binders, and papers, even though I finished undergrad eleven years ago (omg) and grad school seven years ago (omggg) - but it was high time to prune the collection. One simply does not need four severely outdated textbooks on developmental psychology. But it's hard to part with this stuff! It's like a visual reminder that, once upon a time, I knew all that crap. And this is the stuff that defines me, in a way - at least, the young-adult-version of me.

But, you know, reality check. Baby coming. Times a-changin'. And? Totes sick of the yellow walls, and can't paint until the room is cleared out. I started perusing the stack of over a dozen coursepacks and realized that if I hadn't read them to begin with (ahem), I probably wasn't going to reference them in the future. And anyway, isn't that what Google is for? So: out with the coursepacks, out with nearly all the textbooks, out with the contents of the binders. I couldn't part with everything, especially not all of my social work texts, so I'm allowing myself to keep one shelf's worth of school stuff, but it's major progress. I also slogged through my memento box that's traveled with me since I left my childhood home (and actually got rid of some stuff from it...gasp); I sold three big things on Craigslist; and I found a new location for my collection of children/young adult books.

As for the rest of the stuff? Well, THIS IS WHERE DOMINO MADNESS BEGINS. Baby deserves to sleep in a crib not made of coursepacks --> must clean out yellow room --> but I'm not getting rid of all my stuff / J.J. isn't either --> need to relocate remaining stuff to basement/hall closet --> basement and hall closet both need to be cleaned out and storage bins need to be purchased. Let's not kid ourselves here, though, people. This is my dream come true. I'm designing a nursery for the baby that I think is really going to happen, AND I have to get to purge and organize in order to make it happen?! Best problem ever.

So, another update soon, after I tackle the hardest, most cluttered part of the room...which I haven't even shown you yet: our closet of disorganized shame.

Photo albums, comic books graphic novels, old magazines, children's books, yearbooks, memento boxes, a dozen journals, and mayyyyybe two scrapbooks dedicated individually to R.E.M. and U2. That's right. Which I haven't looked at since 1998, but somehow haven't been able to dispose of yet. This closet alone is taking forrrevvvverrr to go through. In the meantime, my quest of selling, donating, purging, and relocating continues...all in the name of anal retentiveness the Baby.

Sorta hard to tell, but that's the baby giving us a high five three weeks ago.
(Hand is below where it says "Hand" - all five fingers pointing to your left.)
(Holy mackerel, there's something inside of me with at least five fingers.)