The Storm Before the Calm?

Have you ever had one of those moments where you just decide you need a change? I had one of those as I stared at my "Teaching Room". You know, we all have that space. That area of our house where we have too many educational resources, books, tools, items, all focused on teaching things. Well, in our house it has even been given a name. The "Teaching Room". Now, in actuality, it is the "Catch All Room". It is that place where we store those bits of random things we don't know where to put. It also (will) double as my sewing/crafting room, but the vision of a nicely organized and put together room are far in the future.

This morning, I woke up with determination. I was going to go and put 20 minutes worth of work down in this mysterious Teaching Room. Today's struggle, book organization.

When I left Grade 5, I took my entire classroom library with me. I had collected, scrounged, ordered and found books like you wouldn't believe. They all came with me as we travelled across the province to a new city for work. Believe it or not, in my classroom they were all pretty and organized. They were in easy to access buckets and my kids loved it. As I packed up my classroom, all the books went in boxes, I had my kids help me, and just now am I starting to go through that mess and a half.

So this morning, book organization. I have a ton of large Rubbermaid bins on the sidelines ready to go. I grabbed a couple boxes and tore them open. Books were everywhere. They were in piles. They were in stacks. They were in groupings on the floor. It was a disaster, and it still is.

As my 20 minutes went by, then 40, then 60.... 90 minutes later I stopped, looked back at my work and decided that was enough for today. I began reflecting. This is the messy part of organization. This is The Storm Before the Calm. One day, all of these things will be neatly organized and I shall feel very accomplished, but now... it is a complete and utter disaster.

I decided to take a leap. I took some pictures and here I am blogging about this experience. I began reflecting on how social media promotes the best of the world, but never the worst. People don't take those selfies where you look slightly haphazard, you post the ones where you think you look great. No one shows this organizational chaos, only the gorgeous finished product. As I was thinking about this, I wanted to be real. I LOVE LOVE LOVE organization. I love the pretty binders, the colour coding, the bins, but it is a process to get there. This mess and chaos which is still sitting in my basement waiting for some love, and I am here to share it with you.




As you can see, there are 2 lovely buckets (the grey and the blue) located underneath the shelves. That is my accomplishment for today. I am happy to say, they are labelled with all the categories of books, and will make it easy for me to find books in the future. But the rest... this chaos, this is real life. 

Now, as I went through, I found a bazillion books with no labels. At first, I was getting hung up about what to do with all these, and then I decided to make my life a bit easier. I created and labelled a bucket of "NO LABELS". That is what you see here. Clearly I have a lot of work ahead of me.



Here is a bit more of my progress and a half completed bin, accompanied by one of my "piles" of books.

Whew. This pretty room is far from perfect, but there was progress made today. I feel accomplished, and I can not wait to show you what it looks like in the end!