It’s Day 2 of the William Morris Challenge (for details click here) and it took me awhile to determine what I was going to declutter today. Mostly as I laid in bed and tried to get the energy and momentum to get the dogs off me so I could get up.
I decided to work on an area that gets a lot of use but not a lot of attention, my charging station:
I have this little area right inside the front door and it serves to charge my cell phone and bluetooth, hold the contents of my purse and corral clutter.
First step, as always, was to dump everything out. This was only possible because the dogs were outside and thus unable to steal my chapstick and eat it.
Yeah… I found gift certificates, more business cards, 3-D glasses, eye glass cleaner, more lip gloss, random cords, a button, a rubber band… you get the idea.
Luckily, most of these items have homes. A jar under the sink collects rubber bands, a box in the bathroom has all eye glass related stuff, a jar in the guest room holds random buttons.
I grabbed some generic surface cleaner and a rag to dust the charging station and got that cleaned up. The drawer now holds my gift certificates that need to be redeemed. The 3-D glasses are in with my movies until I decide to recycle them at the movie theater and I’ve added more to the stack o biz cards to enter online.
While I like this little area I started thinking about painting the charging station or labeling the organizer. But it doesn’t really need it, they look fine and I guess I’m just not “that” domestic gal who coordinates everything. I’ve got bigger projects to worry about!
And, because I can’t just do one area, I also tackled this cubby in my master bedroom headboard. Mostly because it also holds chargers and I needed to clean those up.
Ignore the weird angle, apparently my camera is drunk. These corn bags are awesome, a lifesaver for my back when it’s sore or tight and easy to heat in the microwave for 5 minutes. Plus it’s feed corn, not popcorn, so they’re reusable.
The little box with all the pins doesn’t fit in here very well so off I went to find a better container. Here’s what was inside the basket is misfit toy chargers:
As you can tell it’s a huge mess of cables and chargers and I’m so glad to have it sorted! Bonus: I finally found the cords for my old handheld camera so I can download videos from Christmas time. Most of these cords went to the office where I have boxes for each electronic “thing” like my ipod, phone, audio, video camera, ipad… all that jazz.
As a result I was able to get this down to the essentials, a spare phone charger and the iPad/iPod charger, both of which fit in this small basket (which originally held a bath set gift I got for Christmas):
The small blue container has travel stuff like ear phones, a compact charger and iPad converters. Easy to pack too!
Well, that wasn’t as hard as I thought once I got started – what are you working on making useful and beautiful in your home?
To get all the details see the Day 1 post here – office supplies & an Ikea Caddy
i hated doing it but after reading day 1, i got up and went into the sewing ‘area’ (until i get our furniture here the dining room is the sewing room, and i am surely going to miss it when i get furniture!!) and took out several bags of things to donate (that were sent to me to look through for crafting). Next, find a place that will take and use them, or I may FREECYCLE them! Great motivation. I hope I can keep up with you… I might just do two areas tomorrow so i can say i am ‘caught up’ to you!
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