1. Your Work Space

My work space at work is pretty boring. I run the front desk and some days it takes all three of my computers to stay caught up. I have one family picture of me & Josh and then some pictures of Josh from the year he shot his antelope, deer and elk. I try to keep my desk pretty simple since the public sees it every day. My only splurge at my desk, is my ilive for my ipod.

The work space that I get excited about is my craft room. I try to spend a few hours in there every weekend. Now that we have Friday's off, I use it as my reward: after the house is cleaned, then I can go craft. I have to do that because if I started crafting before I cleaned, my house would never get clean.

I have noticed one thing about my craft room, it takes such a short time to get messy. I am horrible at getting something out, but then not putting it away when I'm done with it. I moved into the pink room so I could have more room to organize, but instead I just have more room to make a mess.

That wouldn't be so bad, if I cleaned up before leaving the room each time, but most of the time I don't. When I go in to craft the next weekend, I just push stuff to the side and then get more stuff out. This pattern continues until my table is so buried, I can't find anything.

I think one of the reasons is because I tend to work on one project for an extended period of time. When I was making Christmas Cards in January, I had Christmas stamps and papers strung out everywhere. Currently, I am working on getting the pictures from the Hanke Family Reunion 2009 into a scrapbook. I have a TON of pictures sorted into dozens of different piles.

Here is where the layers of piles come into play. Last weekend I took a small break from working on the family reunion pictures to finish some other pages I had started at scrapbook group, but didn't get the chance to finish. Instead of putting the other stuff away, I just piled on top of it.

Here are a few pictures:

One of the things I don't like in my craft room, is how I organize all of my papers. I stack it on my shelf that is across the room from my table. So each time I need paper and I have to walk across the room and dig through it all until I find what I want. When I'm done with it, I just toss the package on the floor next to me. The stack in this picture is actually smaller then normal.

The lamp shade is on the floor, because the lighting in the room sucks, so I took the shade off the lamp to hopefully improve things. I did close all of the drawers in the filing cabinet before taking the picture, but I didn't close the drawers in the stand next to it.

Here is a picture of my table, before I cleaned of the top layer of projects.

Under all of this was a layer of papers and stamps for the camping pictures, but I didn't get a picture, because then I moved on to the next layer of mess.

My various assorted piles of pictures. Sometimes I am lucky and they don't get mixed up.

I keep my stamps and ink pads to my right. I got tired of opening the drawer to go through my stamps, so I finally just set it on the floor. I don't get in the bottom drawer often, so this set up works for now. Usually I don't let the cats in the room with me, but when I do, they like to go through the opening the middle drawer left and sit in the bottom drawer. That is one of the reasons I don't let them in the room.

Here is my table when it is clean. It amazes me how much room I have to work!

I should have took another picture, because once the room was all cleaned up, I went right back to scrapbooking and now my table is chaos again.