Clean Up in Aisle 11!

Facts for context:

1. I still live at home with my parents.
2. At 23, still living at home with my parents, I still sometimes act like a teenager.
3. Teenagers aren't always known for tiny bedrooms.
4. I moved from the biggest bedroom in the house to the smallest.
5. I made that move in a day.
6. At one point, I had no floor-space because everything was dumped in the room.

All of that in mind, you will be please to know that I have actually tidied my room! This might not seem like such a big deal, but when you look at how I was living up until a few days ago, you'll see why this is so important for me.

For me to access my desk - which is where I sit when I'm using my laptop to write, or record/edit videos, or do anything else laptop-related - I had to:

1. Move everything off the floor and onto my bed, to access the chair. This included: a laptop bag, a backpack, two cameras, a portable DVD player, three boxes (two of which were empty!), a pile of books, a bag of stationary, a pile of folded up jeans, a pile of sheets and printed articles, and a birthday present.

2. With my access to the chair secured, I then needed to move a laptop tray from the chair. However, on this laptop tray was a pile of: magazines, notebooks, newspaper supplements, folders of various sizes accessories for the DVD player, and a belt. This required moving two, increasingly wobbly, piles of items to the bed.

3. With the chair cleared, I then had to move a pile of notebooks from the desk to - you guessed it - the bed, so I would room on the desk for just about anything else.

All in all, it took at least five minutes to do it, and I had to put it all back at the end of the night to get into bed. That's not good. That's very much not good. The amount of effort it took to access my desk meant that I didn't even bother half the time. Translation: I didn't use my laptop an awful lot of the time. This is the primary reason I didn't finish my novel last month, because I had created a physical obstacle to work.

So, I fixed it. I still have the laptop tray on my chair, but it now only holds the cameras and the DVD player. One easy move. If I want to clear the floor, I only have a couple of bags to move - one of which contains the birthday present, which won't be around for much longer. I can now easily access my laptop. But I didn't stop there.

Because I had to clear the way to the laptop, it meant I also had to put a lot of stuff away. Every magazine is now stored properly under my bed. In fact, everything that didn't belong in the open, has been put away, and my bookshelves have been re-organised.

The process took me just over an hour - because I was rushing to finish by noon yesterday - and it means I can now easily find my books on business, personal development, writing, and mental health. Plus, all the fiction I want easy access to is either on the main shelves, or on the easiest to of the secondary shelves at the end of my bed. (Those books can't really be seen, because of how close the shelves are to the bed. Which is where a lot of the books I wanted to access were stored!)

All in all, the room feels cleaner, I can relax more easily in it, and I know that whenever I want to read a book from my shelf, I don't have to look very hard to find it. I may still sometimes act like a teenager, but finally I'm starting to treat my bedroom like I'm an adult. And by bedroom, I mean bedroom-cum-office. I think I'm going to need a bigger room.

So That's What My Floor Looks Like!

Since I was released from the shackles of third level examinations, I've been cleaning my room. It's been and on-again, off-again task these past couple of weeks, because I just didn't want to do it. As far as I was concerned, sitting about playing games or watching videos or reading books was much easier to do from the chair or bed in the room. It was a rare thing to have to actually use the floor for anything.

Alas, that logic does not hold up with the house-owners (i.e. my parents.) While I'm still too underemployed and poor to move out, this is how it has to be. If they want my room to be clean so that they could, theoretically, walk about it (while ducking... no matter how clean the floor, the ceiling will always be low), then that's how it has to be.

In practice, they never enter my room.

They've done so on...three occasions in the past two weeks. Once to open the windows during our heatwave. Once to get something copied in my printer. And once just to look and see if the room was clean.

However, I've really gone at it of late, and it's paid off...kind of.

I mean, I still have to do a few different things to finish up, but the majority of the rubbish has been cleared from the floor. Now there's just a lot of things that don't seem to have a home anywhere.

I have no idea what to do with them, and they're all necessary to keep. So...that's going to be difficult to manage. On the bright side, at least I've made some progress and can see my floor more easily. Once the tidying is done, I'll be rearranged my room to better suit my needs. Whether my parents like it or not, I'm thinking of adding more storage space to my room.

That equates to more bookshelves, and possibly somewhere to put the likes of folders for various projects. It needs some planning, and some money. So that'll be fun.

Tomorrow's post may be a little bit short... I'll be out pretty much all day, and depending on my levels of exhaustion and my ability to type on my phone at said levels of exhaustion, my ability to say anything of value may vary considerably from the norm.