It sort of feels like this year has been a lot of “work before the work”. We set a lot of goals for ourselves, but none of those were really simple to achieve. And then I tried to knock off some of the simpler steps on my own, week by week, but even those proved to be sometimes more than I could bite off between work and family and the occasional sleep. Looking back over the year (which I tend to do quite a bit as the year ends) I can see just how much we’ve accomplished and how many things we’ve set into motion. But there are still so many piles – real ones and figurative ones. Slowly we wade through them, in borrowed moments here and there. But in between it’s hard to find a place to do the work, before the work is done.
The shelves are slowly filling up as I find some time here and there to sort through and organize and collect and purge the creative things we’ve amassed over the years. On our big trek to Georgia each year for Thanksgiving we end up hitting Atlanta right at rush hour. We’ve found that we can get off the interstate at the north end of the city and stop in IKEA for a bit, pick up those things that we’ve been wanting all year, eat some Swedish meatballs, and get back on the road after most of the mess has died down. This year I was super prepared with a list / price / item numbers. A lot of them had to do with storage pieces, and also some matching hardware for the new things we are adding to the house – like pulls for E’s new desk.
I got these nice seagrass bins for the top shelf of the room. They will hold things we don’t need to access too often, like manuals for electronics and some things related to filing. And slowly the rest is coming together. In thumbnail shots it’s looking great…
…but the floor and the desk are one big hot mess. And so now I need to buckle down and get through this so that I can move on to the projects I need to tackle. The work before the work isn’t always glamorous, but it’s necessary, and there is a certain joy to it. (Or so I tell myself to keep on going!)
