Thursday, January 3, 2013

Organizing Revolution 2013: The Home Office

I recently just started reading the blog Clean Mama, thanks to pinterest:). And it seems that I started just in time! The Top Organizing Bloggers are having a month long challenge and it includes prizes!

This first week the challenge is to organize your home office. Since I am starting my home organizing business, (Fort Dodge Home Organizing,) this seemed like a great thing for me to do!

First let's start with my challenges.

#1: Moving soon! I'm hoping to purchase a house in the next month, so anything I do for the organizing challenge this month has to be completely adaptable to the new house.

#2: My desk. It was originally purchased for my husband to use, so it's not very functional as an office desk. There are zero drawers and no decent spot for my printer. This left my printer on the floor and my office supplies in a box in the closet.

#3: Paper clutter. I had my filing system halfway done, but until it was totally complete and I had created a home for everything, the papers just kept getting piled up.


My solution to the first two problems was to buy a cart with drawers! It gives me more than enough room for all of my office supplies and it's the perfect home for my printer! And it's a good home for my home management binder, because the easier it is to access, the more likely I am to use it. The bonus of course is that I can most likely make this work in my home office area in any home, because it's not too big and is easy to move around.


Inside the top drawers I used some little baskets to keep the drawers extra organized! I just love it:). Opening the drawers makes me happy!


For more storage, I bought the two pretty bins on top of the desk! They're cardboard and were $5 for the pair at Wal-Mart! I totally love them. The print is so pretty and you can't beat that price. I hung some pictures of my girls just to have something nice to look at, and the clock and calendar are a must in any home office space.


To tackle the paper clutter I finally finished sorting through everything and created a plan for taking care of paper work in the future.



 This is pretty much my whole system. The file folder on the desk is for paper that needs to be looked through, or that needs to be acted on. The box below is for things I need to file and keep long term. The black basket is where I toss my recycling.


Here is the whole space! I really love it. It was pretty budget friendly, especially since I bought most of this stuff over the course of a whole year. Taking little steps and buying what I could, when I could. I will definitely get a lot of work done here!



PS: I think the desk may have a makeover in its future, this spring when it's not so cold and the snow has melted. I want to keep it for the sake of saving money, but it is definitely not pretty and I think I could fix that, at least a little bit. So be on the lookout for that in the future!

PPS: Remember to vote for me! I'm #122! (But the number may change, so look for Tara at FD Home Organizing.)

Organizing Homelife

5 comments:

Unknown said...

very nice. Love the printer cart/drawers. Good luck with your new business!

Unknown said...

You did a nice job with this project. Looks great.

Natasha Randall said...

Organising items in the home office can really make you more efficient and getting the right storage system is one of the essentials that can help keep your things in place. Good job for that!

fanghua said...

Hey, what you've done for now is great! If you are having the plan of adding a more professional chair to your office area, this link may help.
Ergonomics

Ruby said...

It's good to see that you managed to organize your home office along with your heaps of papers. And since you'll be regularly dealing with papers, why not try to have separate file folders for things you need to do, are currently working on, and one for the files you need to keep. That way, you can easily sort out what you can immediately throw away to avoid paper clutter. Best of luck!
Ruby @ Williams Data Management