The Situation:

When my client moved into a new home, her busy schedule kept her from having time to properly set-up and establish her home office in the most efficient manner. Now, a few years later, with two daughters — ages 6 and 5 months — keeping her on the go, the piles of paper and stacks of clutter in this mom’s office continued to grow and were out of control.

The Challenge:

The office nook was filled to the brim with boxes and bags of paperwork, books, photos, mementos and kids’ artwork. The floors, shelves, and built-in desk weren’t even visible.
The Solution: 

To tackle this challenge, we began sorting and categorizing all the papers in boxes and bags. Initially, we had “keep”, “toss” and “shred” piles. Then we sorted the “keepers” into “active” and “archival” piles. Two to three boxes of archival files found a new home in a basement filing cabinet while I created an easy-to-use daily filing system for this mom’s active files. We also boxed up mementos and photos for storage in the overhead cabinets and created homes for office supplies and other items she would need regularly. Anything not office- or memento-related was moved to other parts of the house. And what a difference it made! Who knew that cute floor and countertop were there?