What's an "empty drawer"???

I feel the need to prove that I really am doing other stuff besides making classy toilet paper tube crafts.  My quest to organize every piece of paper in the Green House is pretty much done.  Not every single piece of paper has been dealt with, but when I uncover a new piece I've already got a designated place for it to be filed and that was the main goal.  It wasn't so much about dealing with all the random paperwork we had accumulated as much as it was about having a system in place for the daily influx of new paper.

Let's take a look at my desk, which hasn't really functioned as a desk in quite some time.  It was bad.  It's a large antique pedestal desk that used to be in my Grandfather's office.  Jayson hates it because it's a beast to move and it takes up a lot of space.  I love it because it has that ginormous flat surface that I can pile stuff on.  Obviously.

I also love it because it's a beautiful piece of furniture.  All the joints are dovetailed and it has these cool wooden knobs, deep drawers and lots of character.  And when it's cleaned up it's one of the few decent pieces of furniture here at Casa de la Garage Sale.

I forgot to take a "before" picture of the drawers on the left side before I cleaned them out.  I haven't finished cleaning out all the drawers so here's a peek at the right side and the center drawer.













Kinda junky, yeah?  When I was giving them the once over, I found a circa 2003 phone book from a town I haven't lived in for 8 years.  There's also some 3-1/2" floppy disks shoved in the back of one of the drawers.  Come to think of it, there might be a computer in my garage that will take those disks.

Oh.  The garage.  *shudder*

So here's the left side of the desk all cleaned out.  The top drawer has my bill paying stuff: address labels, stamps, letter opener, stapler, envelopes, boxes of extra checks, etc.

The file drawer has my new cleaned out files in it.  I have paid bills, product warranties, misc. household files, etc.  This drawer will house stuff that I need to keep but not forever.  The forever stuff is in my Grab & Go Hurricane Box which will not live inside the desk.
The bottom drawer on the left side is a strange phenomenon that I have not seen before.  I Googled it and discovered that it is known as "an empty drawer".  I've never seen that before!  Apparently, if you have one of these rare gems you can use it at a later date for some unexpected purpose that you weren't expecting.  Or something like that.  It's still new to me and I'll have to do some more research to see how I am supposed to deal with this so called "empty drawer".






Here is the top of the desk all cleaned off.  And I didn't just move the pile to another location like I usually do, I actually put stuff back where it belonged or I got rid of it.  That pitiful little wicker organizer in the corner might have to go but for now it's doing a good job of holding all our notepads.  I have a paper fetish and it's not just confined to pretty papers.  I have lots of blank journals and note pads but I'm keeping them because I do actually use them.  I'm a list maker and even if I don't follow my lists I still feel the need to make them.

Now I feel all naked because I've shown you my drawers (heh) but I'm feeling really good about the changes happening around here!  Today's list includes the right side of the desk and then I think I'll dive into the book shelves since they're paper too.  I really love books and have a hard time getting rid of them so that project will probably be more organizing than purging.  We don't have any bookshelves for the new house so I need to get online and do something about that pretty soon.  I might just send Jayson back to IKEA for those.

The built-in bookshelves we have here also have these little covered cabinets below them where you can stash stuff then pull the door down so that no one can see.  Yeah.  I've stashed stuff alright.  I'm not sure if I have the intestinal fortitude to show you how I've mistreated those areas.  Well, a couple of them aren't so bad, they have some old CDs and VCR home videos in them.  But I'm pretty sure my dead dog is still in one of them.  I put him there because I didn't know what else to do with him and it upset me to see him like that so I just closed the door on that cabinet and left him there.  In his ziploc sammich baggie.  His cremated remains.  Bless his heart.