My "Ugly Room" Challenge

• Who can find a virtuous woman? her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household
• She eateth not the bread of idleness

Do you have an "ugly room"?

You know, the room that starts off as one thing--a spare bedroom, or an office--and then transitions into a multi-use room--a spare bedroom/office/library/extra closet space room. And before you know it, it becomes the "I have no place to put this, put this in the "                         room" room. Or, "Put this in the                         room, I'll put it away later" room.  Maybe even the "Quick, someone is coming over, put everything out of sight in the                               room" room.

Feel free to fill in the blank with whatever yours is called.

Whatever name you use, it becomes the dumping ground for whatever you don't have space/time/energy to deal with.

I have one of those rooms.  Mine is euphemistically called "the front bedroom", even though there isn't a bed in it anymore, and it's actually on the back side of our house.  Our house belonged to my grandparents at one time, and that's what they called it, so that's what we call it, too--although, in their day, it was actually a bedroom! And it was the "front" bedroom, because it's the first bedroom you come to when you start down the hall from the "front" or more public portion of the house. But I digress.  Or as we say in the south "chase a rabbit".

Lately, though, I've been calling mine the "ugly room", because that's what it is to me.

And I'm determined to change it.

In April, when I was posting on the "Clean in 30 Days" house cleaning challenge, I thought I would get the rest of the house clean first, and then tackle this sore spot.  And then in May, when I was doing the "Clutter Busting Challenge", I kept thinking that I would get to this room eventually.  In both cases, I got sidetracked by life from my ultimate goal of Getting This House Clean From Top to Bottom--including my junk room.

Sidetracked by life, and also, I admit it, personal dread of even tackling it.

I am making a resolve, though, to quit running and hiding from challenges, and instead to tackle them--head on, if I can get the courage, or on the blind side just a little at a time if that's all I can manage.

I really enjoyed blogging about the Clean in 30 and Clutter Busting challenge, so I decided to make my own challenge, I'm calling it  My "Ugly Room" Challenge.

Step one on any 12-step program is to admit you have a problem.

Well, I'm going to do one better--I'm going to take you on a little tour and show you my problem room, in all of it's ugliness.

When you walk into my ugly room squarely from the door, this is the sight that greets you.  This is my office corner, which, as you can see, has the requisite equipment--desk, chair, printer/scanner, filing cabinet, paper shredder, and even task lighting--note the reading lamp clipped to the edge of a file drawer.  Lighting is atrocious in this room, all we have is a ceiling fan light in the middle of the room, so when you sit at the desk, you create your own shadowed work space, and with the paneling, it feels slightly cave-like.  

And, as you can see, we have no lack of paper clutter.  This is my "to-be-filed" stack. I told my husband that I didn't file because, although, there was a filing cabinet and desk, there was no place to sit at the desk unless I waggled in a kitchen chair.  So I requested a new office chair as a gift, which I received--in December.  Hmmm.

Slightly to the left is the old desk chair, which actually belongs to my son, and as you can see, has issues.  Ha!  My husband thinks he can fix it, so we haven't gotten rid of it, but once it's fixed, it'll take it's place in another room.  Behind that is an old easy chair, part of a past effort to make a cozy reading nook beside the bookcases.  (See "lack of good lighting" above.)

And that brings us to--the bookcases. These were my pride and joy at one time--stacked and organized and arranged just so--but somewhere along the line we got more books than they could hold, and as we pulled and read and put back, and meanwhile, kept acquiring more books--it's become so difficult to find what we're looking for, I think we've actually bought a couple of books more than once, because we couldn't find the original, or even worse, forgot we already had it. And this is not to mention the books we bought when we were living elsewhere that are still in boxes, because, obviously, there was no place to put them when we moved back home.

And now to the lovely hand-me-down sofa that lives under this pile of clothes and books and baskets and bags and who-knows-what-else.  It's really a pretty sofa, and very comfortable for both sitting and napping, which you can't say about just any sofa.  And yet, here it is, un-sat-or-napped-upon because it's to much trouble to un-load it, and where would you put the stuff on it, anyway.

As you can see, I have all of the bones to make a really nice office/library/sitting room, it's just buried under so much stuff, that you can't even see the bones, much less flesh them out and build on them.

Can anyone relate?

I've actually already been working in my ugly room a little at a time this past week.  It has to be a little at a time, because any more time than that and I find myself so overwhelmed or wracked with indecision about what to do with some of the items in there, that it becomes a waste.  There are moments that I've gotten on a roll and done more than I intended, there have also been times that I find myself sitting on the broken chair and reading, or looking at old photos that I've unearthed, or even speculating on just how long some object has been hidden away in a box without me even remembering it was there. I've chased a lot of rabbits when I needed to be purging and decluttering and cleaning.

A lot of the "stuff" that I'm finding is perfectly good "stuff".  It just isn't relevant to who I am any more--like books on parenting small children, or hobbies that I don't do any more.  Tax forms from more years ago than I care to remember.  Double and triple prints of photos where I was obviously just trying to use up the end of the roll. Collections of things that I don't really collect any more.

So I'm working on it.

Sometimes we just get busy, and things suffer for it.  But sometimes I think having an "ugly room" can be a symptom of larger issues for some of us.  At times I find myself bogged down in life, just like I get bogged down in my "ugly room".  I have the bones--the basics--for a very fulfilling life, and yet I  manage to fill it so full of stuff--not bad stuff, just stuff that may not be relevant to who I am anymore--so that instead of feeling fulfilled, I just start to feel ugly, inside and out.

Like my ugly room.

When that happens, I need to stop and re-evaluate, what is relevant and useful and pretty, and what is not.  
My ugly room is changing, little by little, and so am I.

Line upon line, line upon line.  Precept upon precept, here a little and there a little.

I'll keep you updated.

Until next time.

This post is linked to:
Show and Tell Saturday at Be Different...Act Normal
Make Your Home Sing Monday at Mom's the Word