Yes, I am getting organized. Week 2 of the Organize Your Stuff Challenge

This corner of this room is the center of my scrapbooking (and art journaling) creativity. Except for one black filing box full of tags and a few other things I don't use all the time, this photo contains everything I use to create my pages. And this stuff is pretty well organized - for me at least. Obviously, there is a great deal of room for improvement. But look how far I have come already!

I took these two photos when trying to do Week 2 of an earlier round of the Organize Your Stuff Challenge. I think this photo was taken during Round 2, it actually would have to have been because I took that photo of the tractor in early 2010. I forgot I still had that godforsaken guest bed then! Perhaps you can see why I gave up. But I didn't completely give up. For four years then I had persistently been nagging my husband about my dislike of having that bed in there. Sometime later in 2010, persistence paid off. A couple we are friends with needed an extra bed, and my husband gave this one to him. That freed up room for the bookcase, which I purchased sometime in 2011.

At the time I took these earlier pictures, I drew in one of my little altered notebooks a sketch of what I dreamed the scraproom would look like. I don't know where that notebook is now, but an image in my mind of that sketch governed how I reorganized the scraproom after getting the bookcase.

I cannot remember if my sketch addressed what I knew was a growing trend among owners of the condominiums where I live, which is to convert the room that is next to the kitchen to either an extended kitchen, or to a den. The room in question in my condo is the scraproom. If the floor plan has not been altered, as is the case here, the room shares a common wall with the kitchen, but can only be accessed by going through the hall. In a perfect world, I would have enough money to knock out all or part of the wall like my neighbors have, but in my perfect world, the room behind the wall would not be more of  the kitchen or a den, it would still be my scraproom. Only, it would be so perfectly organized and luxuriously furnished I would not mind one bit if everyone visiting my home could see inside. However, even if my sketch even addressed that dream, it did not address the current reality - more so now than in the past - that the vast majority of my supplies are against that wall. It also did not address the current reality that I do not have a job, nor would have I had enough income even when I did, to afford a remodeling project or anything but this "shabby chic" mix of thrift store finds and one new but dirt cheap bookcase.

Even so, after getting the cheap bookcase, I have since taken one additonal step in the reorganization process. I used to keep all my loose scrapbook papers in the plastic shelves where you now see scrapbooks. They are now in the burgundy paper keeper next to it. This freed up a lot of room in the middle of the floor. I still also need to free up some space elsewhere for the blue storage container next to it, because right now it prevents me from putting a chair at the desk. Hence, the desk is good for storing things, like the layouts in progress, but not necessarily for creating things. And I know there are things here and there that could be improved, like what to do with the clutter on the desk, how to make the supplies pictured here more easily accessible, maybe even making that bookcase look a little less cluttered too. And is it possible to make my "shabby chic" a little more chic than shabby?

But what I have right now is a dream compared to what I had in 2010. So, I'm not even going to draw out a new dream . I am just going to go along for the ride of Round 6 and hope the finished product is way better than this Beginning of Round 6 midpoint.