Long overdue, and driven by confinement, the much needed office cleaning has begun.

For the last few years, since I stopped consulting and using my office as regularly, the home office has become a dumping ground for things to finish later. Yesterday and today we’ve started cleaning the office to make room for multiple inhabitants to use it at the same time.

There are three desks in the office, and they used to all be pretty tidy, used entirely for computing, in what looks like a pretty paper-free environment. Today, though, two of the desks are piled with to-do papers and boxes. The third, mine, at least has a workable area around the keyboards and mice, but it does look a lot more like that dude’s desk in Jurrasic Park.

We’re making a small effort to discard the discardable. We’re making a larger effort to just put yet-to-do stuff in a more appropriate staging area. There are lots of hand-me-down toys we set aside and never handed down. There are boxes from equipment, like phones, keyboards, and tablets, that we don’t really need to keep any longer. There are all of those healthy eating cookbooks that had been thumbed through, and then set aside until a better place could be found. There are more than a few “please fix this for me” computers tucked underneath that I never got to fixing, and no one wants any more.

One of the hardest parts has been keeping the kids from regressing to wanting to play with those infant and toddler toys. They sure are colorful and make lots of noise. There are myriad documents that need to be burned or shred, for privacy not malicious reasons. Years of old paystubs and bank statements from before everyone went paperless, as well as the collection of reviews from our financial planner that we don’t want out in the wild. They’re by the shredder we have, and the kids have enjoyed feeding that beast, but now I have a bunch of bags of strips; or puzzle pieces to reconstruct if you want to read the documents. I have been sold the belief that I need a confetti shredder...also why we haven’t done it.

These are interesting times, but at least we’re getting some more useable space in the house. Getting it back, anyway.