home office storage | organised castle

I have spent most of today decluttering but I have very little to show for my efforts.

This is the view of the storage in our office and it looks exactly the same as when I started.

The reason is because I sorted out some of the paperwork which lives in one of these drawers. Some might say that it is not clutter if it fits neatly in a drawer. However, these are papers that are no longer required for a variety of reasons so I shredded them.

The drawer now looks like this. There are now 6 cardboard folders for different categories – 2 were discarded as the contents were all obsolete. It is hard to believe that we once had a 4 drawer filing cabinet.

I ended up with half a bag of shredded paper.

So, why bother doing this when I have plenty or space to store it? The documents I shredded are entirely obsolete and/or I have digital copies. They included tax returns and bank statements more than 5 years old and the like. I generally clear these things out every year or so. By having less it make the important things easier to locate when required.

We unpacked almost all of the removalist boxes within the first week or two that we were here. However, there were nine boxes of books which remained. They were stacked in the lounge room as we were not 100% sure of where we actually wanted them and there is nothing worse than packing and unpacking books.

After living here for a few months and with the impending arrival of the new lounge furniture, we decided to unpack the books into the shelving units in the office. Office is probably slightly too grand a description as it is essentially a walkway through from the hall to the laundry.

The books take up all of the glassed-in upper shelves and about half of the lower ones. The remainder is storage for some stationery items and other miscellaneous bits and pieces.