Newspapers to Riches

Surely several of you out there in bloggy land have desks that are unused. Unused not because of their placement or impractical nature, but because they look like this:



Yeah, me too.

By now, you probably think I'm the messiest person alive. But honestly, most of the areas I'm showing you are either closed off (like the inside of my desk) or not as noticeable - which would be why they don't get cleaned as frequently. Well, except for the big project that I'm gathering strength for. That's very visible and is one of the areas I hate most in our house. But that's another day.

Today my big project was to declutter my desk. Actually my project started out with just trying to clean off the TOP of the desk since it looked so hideous.



But really it went so quickly that I felt invigorated and decided to shoot for bigger goals. And now my desk looks like this:



BIG difference! And it's not just the visible parts. I organized all the drawers too. I know ... I'm such an overachiever. (Yeah, right.)

You may wonder what all that clutter was about and what in the world I did with it all. Well aside from a slew of pictures, I have actually sorted through everything and put it away. Imagine that!

Mostly I had a bunch of papers that were ready to be recycled. Things like catalogs I had set there hoping to keep gift ideas close at hand, newspapers that housed articles by Josh or pictures of my kids to cut out, and of course a bunch of random papers that really didn't need to be clogging up my desk.

Oh and $70 in cash! That was nice to find! And it certainly made my hubby pretty excited about my desk cleaning adventure. I guess you never know what you'll find hiding amidst the chaos.

So what are you waiting for ... go clean something! You might get rich doing it.