The House

Today, I spent about 7 hours in the game room.

I think I discovered that the problem with this room has always been that there was simply too much to store in not enough space -- and then whenever anybody wanted to find anything, it was too hard, and whenever anybody wanted to put away something new, they had no idea where to put it.

When we moved in, we spent 2 months tiptoeing around giant boxes of wires and games, and I was so tired of climbing over things that I took it upon myself to find a place for everything. And everything had a place, but with just barely enough room as it was. Most of it stayed where it was (because it hasn't been touched in 2.5 years), but anything that had been touched had been moved, because I think I was the only one who knew where things went. And it ended up in serious disarray.

I spent about 7 hours today with a new strategy for this incredible array of items:

1. Any games in easily-stacked cases go immediately to the designated shelf downstairs (Jess's project to organize and make look awesome).
2. Any old cartridge games get sorted properly and packaged together with their respective old-school consoles.
3. Create boxes for Ben to sort (so nothing we don't have to keep is kept, and I'm not actually making any decisions about stuff): audio/video cables & television cords; internet cables; power adaptors; power cables; older-looking computer cables (like old monitor cables); constantly useful computer cables (like USB); a stack of keyboards; a few hundred loose CDs/DVDs; a pile of unidentifyable cables; a heap of old consoles and peripherals; several shelves of programming manuals; a mountain of PC games new and old; a mile wide collection of gaming magazines, comic books, and strategy guides; and a huge bin of action figures.
4. Gather all of Colin's stuff separately (other than games in cases).
5. Throw out a gigantic collection of empty boxes (that were "decorating" the tops of every shelf all the way to the ceiling).

Other than having to run up and down and up and down and up and down the stairs a hundred times, it was actually quite fun. (I am kind of sick when it comes to organizational projects. I just don't stop until it's perfect.)