For most people spring is when they get the itch to really deep clean, I do that as well. But as all the summer stuff starts wrapping up, I start looking at my house and realize, I have spent the summer outside, just basically keeping the surfaces clean all summer, and some spaces, like my office/workspace in the basement, well, that becomes a very disorganized mess throughout the summer as I work but don’t always get everything cleaned up.

Throughout the summer I keep all my market stuff in the corner of my living room. Normally it goes down in said office in a corner there, but that’s in the basement, and hauling all the products and staging materials up and down the stairs is not fun, especially if I’m by myself trying to get everything up and down.

But, in order to put away all my market stuff, I needed to clean up and reorganize my office/workspace, and yesterday was the day. I started just after lunch, and spent a couple of hours doing it. The cleaning part actually wasn’t long, but the reorganizing of my art and sublimation stuff did take a little while. I don’t know how it gets so disorganized, but it sure does!

Sometimes my disorganization really does astound me. I found a pair of scissors I thought I had lost, right there on my cutting table. I found my pencil that I use for marking watercolor paper I am cutting, another thing I thought was lost. I discovered I had a lot more clear plastic bags, for putting art and note cards in, than I had originally thought. I didn’t have as much mat board for the various size prints that I package, so that was good to know as well.

It’s nice to get everything reorganized and inventoried. But mostly, it’s just nice to have a clean workspace. I had to make several sublimation items last night, and I worked in this beautifully clean workspace and cleaned it up when I was done. It’s nice just to walk into that space, and for some reason it’s easier to keep clean in the winter, probably because we’re in the house more in the winter.

I have found that I am most at peace internally when my house is clean. I keep my main floor and my upstairs pretty clean all the time, but the basement, that’s a whole different story. I am grateful to have one space in the basement cleaned up and organized again. The rest will have to wait as my daughter and son-in-law’s whole house is packed into the basement while they save money to buy a house. But I’ll take the people any day of the week over being totally organized down there. Next fall cleaning project – my windows.

I forgot to take the before pictures, but here’s the after: