A Triumph... the Home Office Is Conquered

I am sitting here alone at 10:53 p.m. smugly smiling to myself. As a celebration of the fortitude I exhibited over this past holiday weekend I just blew a bunch of $$$ on the Pottery Barn Samantha Bench with raffia-colored cushion and honey wicker baskets. Why, you ask? Well, I am absolutely delighted to announce a major news item at our humble home... I have frickin' conquered the paper, receipts, brochures, junk mail and other useless crap (99.9785% of it paper) that I had been hanging on to for more than THREE YEARS in our home office/laundry room. This lovely piece of furniture will take the place of the plastic Wal-mart laundry basket that I over-filled with paper until it was sliding off the top.

Yes, that's right, THREE YEARS worth of investment receipts, check stubs, health insurance billing, kids artwork from school, restaurant receipts, and on and on and on. For some reason, I have never quite got a handle on managing our home filing for bills, etc. since the kids were born. Maybe because work and home have become so intertwined with the business I let the home stuff just pile up... it didn't seem important in relation to the Bennett Contracting stuff that I was doing. After moving a bunch of the crap across the street before our renovation started in earnest and then moving it back 10 months later in bags and boxes, Jason had basically had enough. Please, keep in mind, that we moved back into the house in May of 2007, so in addition to what was moved over there and back, I had accumulated another year's worth of paper stacked willy-nilly and in leaning towers all over the place. For awhile Jason took every opportunity to throw a sarcastic remark to me about the paper avalanches in the laundry room/home office, but he gave up a few months ago. Maybe that was the motivation I needed. Ha! Yeah, right. I do think that I really surprised him with this radical departure from the norm. Now, what do you suppose he's going to be giving me shit about next? Well. I don't care because now my laundry room/home office will officially become the laundry room/home office/mudroom with the addition of the pretty little PB bench right next to the door to the garage.