I disappeared down a rabbit hole on Thursday.
It started.....I'm not sure I can remember how it started.
I think I was putting something in the wardrobe, and I had realised some other stuff in the drawer could be chucked. No, that's not right.
It occurred to me that I might be able to use my little handycam as a webcam. I tried it with the USB and it didn't work. I could play back to the laptop, I could upload to the laptop, but I couldn't live stream. My handycam has an HDMI port, and I wondered if that might work (I now know the answer is no, but I didn't know that at the time).
I pulled the box of cables out of the cupboard in th living room. I'm very organised. Every cabke is labelled. Cables that go together, are bagged together and the bag is labelled. The problem is the stupid Ikea boxes are spatially inefficient. As I looked at the mountain of neat bags, I decided there had to be a better storage box.
I had a big plastic box in one of the cupboards upstairs. It was fulk if vacuum cleaner attachments. I emptied that on to the sofa, and put the cables in the box. I could get so many more in, and it was a better use of space.
It looked stupid on the shelf next to the other Ikea baskets. I was sure I had more of these plastic things somewhere. And that is when I slipped down the rabbit hole.
I ended up all the cupboard turned out, all over the living room floor. In the search for replacement receptacles for the Brannas (sp?) baskets that had been in there, I had also ended up turning out one wardroobe upstairs, all over the bedroom floor), and one shelf in another wardrobe which had things like odd socks in the tubs that I needed.
In the end I managed to reclaim 2 large Variera rtubs and 5 small ones. I also found various other shaped containers that might(but didn't) work, and their previous contents were deposited wherever they happened to be.
Not only that, but I decided to remove a cubby hole shelf from the cupboard, so I had to relocate the contents, put two extra (glass) shelves in the cupboard, and so on.
In normal times I would just have bitten the bullet, driven to Ikea, and bought what I needed.
Instead, I had a trail of destruction all over the house.
I couldn't stop myself. I had to carry on until the cupboard was sorted. Once that was done, I'd be able to fix up everyrhing else.
Well, I managed to get the original, glass fronted, cupboard sorted eventually. I even managed to move photos off the windowsill in to it, which was a bonus. Teh kittens keep knocking them off the windowsill.
I managed to box the "Camera Accessories" from the original cupboard along with my old camera, which had been stuffed in another cupboard. I use my phone to take pics now, so I decided to pack the camera and bits away in the loft, and think about selling it. This led me to rearrange that other cupboard as well, as I had some unexpected space in it.
The wardrobe contents were sorted. I binned stuff, I put stuff in the Charity pile, I rearranged stuff, and that's now less clogged up. The odd socks went into the bin. I do have a craft book with suggestions on uses for odd socks, but I wasn't in the mood. DH went through the binned socks retrieved 5 to reunite with the orphans that he had been keeping in his sock drawer (having forgotten that we have had an orphan sock box in my wardrobe).
It took hours. It took all day, all evening, and part of the next day to get under control.
It's neat and tidy now. The plastic boxes are less aesthetically pleasing than the baskets they replace, but they work better. The cupboard looks less cluttered, even though it actually has more stuff in it.
The wardrobes look better.
Some of the other cupboard.....well, I need to find suitable replacements for the plastic boxes.
But I'll worry about that another day.
