Here it is people, the blog you’ve all been waiting for, (you have been waiting haven’t you? You have been checking your RSS feed every day, if not hour/minute for the next installment? C’mon, ‘course you have! Oh, just go with it and humor me for now.) Anyhoo, Day ONE; Ground ZERO; Spare Bedroom Alpha, or, if you prefer, the previously mentioned Backwater.
So what do I tackle first? Ha! easy one, I’m an organiser; I organise things. This space is about to be organised to within an inch of it’s life.
Just to put you in the picture, like most typical spare bedrooms this one has long since ceased to perform the function of peaceful dormitory. Oh, there is a bed housed within it’s cube-like dimensions, but since we have few freinds/family that feel the need to stay with us (my once-a-year-visit from my US girlfriend excepted) and, my partner, being possessed of incredible good taste and discernment, still finds joy in sleeping alongside me, it rarely gets used.
So, like most spare rooms, it has become a storage space for THINGS. What are THINGS? Well in my case, THINGS are Compact Discs, (CDs) Digital Versatile Discs, (DVDs – bet you didn’t know what that  stood for) Large discs of Black Plastic (or LPs, or vinyl, or records, you know, the things you used to buy in record shops last century) and last but not least, row, upon row of Books (or, to make the tie-in with the title complete; long dead trees) Now, before you start to picture a chaotic disc and book induced wasteland, please remember; I’m an organiser. These objects were (for the most part) neatly stacked into and onto racks, shelves and cases. But, they were still taking up space. Not what I want. This is going to be my office. I want minimalist. I want order. I want these THINGS out!
Time to enlist the help of Partner. You see, he’s something of a problem solver. He sometimes manages to think laterally. So, I hit him with my dilemma.
It took him five minutes to solve it. It took him two weeks to fix it.

So, what was the great idea? Simply, technology.
All the CDs went onto a purpose bought hard drive, (Via iTunes) and then into a large container, sealed, and then stored.
All the DVDs went onto the same hard drive, via an extracting software, and then into iTunes. The physical discs came out of the cases, and into multi leaf wallets.
The LPs took a little longer (most of the two weeks) First they were digitised (played into the computer, then imported into; you guessed it; iTunes) LPs have to played in real time, and seeing as my partner has collected around 300 of them, you start to get an idea of the time involved.
Books; Ah, the books. the one thing out of the list that couldn’t fit onto the hard drive, well OK, they could, but not many people have the technology/patience to do this. So we had a good look at all the books we had. Then had a good think about how many of these books we had read – recently. Then we decided, that most of them could go into sealed containers (really sealed) and stored.
The really clever part of all this was that, although all of these items are now neatly stored away/digitised/sealed up, we know exactly where any one particular item is, and, what’s more, we can go to the right container and retrieve it.
And how we do that, how we achieved that piece of brilliant organisation ………is the subject of the next blog. Bye for now.
Sorter Suzy.

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