Organizing All My Paper

Look, an actual project! I was worried I wouldn’t get to this week’s project done. We lost power early yesterday morning just as I was getting up to use the bathroom and I had trouble falling back to sleep. I think the whole town got hit but I couldn’t find any reports online. Also yesterday my dad planned to switch in a new water tank so there was at least water to flush with during the outage that we prepared for the water being out. While he was doing that, a friend of his showing up to help set everything up, I got on with this week’s project.

Every now and then I change up my studio’s systems with the goal of designing a better use of my storage. Today I tackled the papers under Operation: A Place For Everything. I have too much stuff scattered in different areas, sometimes because I thought I was putting everything in an easy to reach spot for whatever project I’m working on. My various artistic and office-type paper types were not in as good a layout as I thought so this week I decided to make it work better, and I wish I could have written that sentence better but I’m not sure how else to explain it. I blame it on writing tired to meet a deadline.

One problem is that I don’t necessarily have a place for everything because I still need to better organize my art and computer desk space, so I ended up doing that terrible idea of temporary locations for certain items. Here’s hoping that doesn’t come back to hurt me.

Purposing My “Smart” Electronics

 

Part of Operation: A Place For Everything is Sub-Operation: A Use For Everything. Well, I have a use for these old smart devices. We have my dad’s smartphone that he didn’t know how to use on the left and the old smartphone with storage so terrible I had to replace it on the right sitting on the keyboard of my old tablet. This week’s project was to finally set them up for the function I decided to give them and optimize the apps and storage towards that goal.

Unfortunately the project was not completed and I’ll go over why in the video. Working on three projects, since I already set up my  current phone recently for what I want to use it for…namely making calls when I’m out and give me something for when I take a walk or have to sit in a waiting room or something in the future…so it was time to get these other things going. This may give you an idea on how to repurpose old smart devices you have, because they still have their uses. Alternately you could clear them out and sell them if they’re still usable to someone, or donate them to a group that gives phones to soldiers overseas so they can call home. I’m pro-recycling but I always like to see something be useful as it before being destroyed and turned into something else that may cost more in the long run. I don’t even know what they do with the bits of recycled devices they smash up.

Re-Organizing The Christmas Decorations

Well, it’s the beginning of the new year. That means the Christmas decorations are coming down and the studio will be back to normal (or what passes for it). This year I thought I’d revisit the organizing of the decorations. I think I talked about it before, the image above coming from a previous article, but new people come along storing their old decorations so why not look at some new techniques involving the process?

This is the blue box where I store my decorations. Usually I put the stuff in the smaller boxes that they’ll fit in and call it a year. Some boxes were dedicated to a particular set of decorations but not really officially, meaning I didn’t always remember where they go. This year I opted to bring Operation: A Place For Everything into my decoration organization. (Hey, that rhymes!) I also made sure that this year I actually remembered to put everything away, as a couple of items skipped out and I had to place them somewhere else rather than having to dig the thing out for two items. This year they all (looks around room) are put away. Here’s some things I decided to try this year to make it easier to find what I want next year.

Redoing The Cubby Hole

This week is another one of those projects where I do the next phase of a previous project. In this case it’s the cubby hole. Last time I didn’t post the finished part of the project. I did find a different location for the bike helmet and that opened up a little room. However, over time what I had in there got a bit messy as I tried to find stuff. This week the goal was to make it easier to find things, and I got to move something to a new location.

Operation: A Place For Everything received both a win and evidence that I still need to find places for everything. This is the longest I call stall this intro so apologies for those coming in on the homepage.

Cleaning The Under Art Desk Shelf

This fell slightly short of being a “quick project”. So I had trouble sleeping Friday night…again, but this time I was able to actually get some organizing done that I wanted to do last week. This is a shelf on the bottom of my art desk. As a former computer desk I guess this was an option for where the computer could go…provided you could turn it on and off with your toe? I don’t remember how I had the computer on this one though I don’t remember getting on the floor any time I wanted to load a disk or CD. Anyway it became a junk shelf until it was blocked by two big piles of comics. Since I was finally able to move those it was time to go after this.

It wasn’t a hard project and only took a few hours, though there are parts I need to still do, possibly next week and hopefully with a bit more sleep, but I got the important part done and that works for me. Let’s go over what I did, because otherwise this isn’t much of a report.

Quick Report: More With The Dresser Clothes

Just a quick follow-up to last week’s report, partly because I accidentally deleted the pictures (this is from last week’s project) and partly because I did a few other projects I needed to do that probably won’t interest this site.

So I did go through the clothes in my dresser to see what fits and what’s in good shape plus the opposite. I already got rid of all the shirts I didn’t need last week. The shorts that I use around the house are all fine as are my swimming shorts but sadly I now only have one pair of going out shorts. Sure I don’t have to worry about that now (it is currently about 10° F out there) but it’s something I’ll have to worry about eventually. Also no issue with the tank tops.

I also did find a better folding system for the shirts, pants, and shorts. Now I can put the tank tops with the shorts. Of course I only have three pair of around the house pants now, and I still need to go through the closets in a later project to see what fits, but now everything is where I wanted to be last week–a drawer for the shirts, one for the pants, and one for the summer clothes. That’s a win.

Organizing My Art Making Papers

Luckily, R2 doesn’t get nosebleeds.

Most of the art I do these days are digital, with the “artputer” running Clip Studio Paint. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned good ol’ fashioned paper as a thing to draw on though. I still enjoy regular drawing, but for most of my current projects I find digital to be easier. That said the various drawers I have my drawing and other art making paper in are kind of mess. So this week the goal was to make it less of a mess. If I want to find my bristol, my computer paper, my carbon paper, or my construction paper among other paper types I need to make that easier.

These various papers are stored in three different drawers; one drawer is part of the set of metal drawers and the other two the plastic drawers by the desk. This is the first project in Operation: A Place For Everything, which I mentioned but didn’t give a name to in last week’s v-log. The mission is to reassess how I store things and dedicate a particular spot for a particular need. The metal drawer box was already “assigned” to “special papers”, stuff I don’t use very often but might have a use for in the future. The other two I really didn’t designate for any particular purpose so things were not as organized as I’d like. So deciding to start with an easy one for Operation: APFE (I’ll work on that) getting this part of the art corner together seemed like the right way to go.