Organizing Madness

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and so on and so forth. This is my life right now. Counting. Little bitty beads. And weighing. Lots and LOTS of metal. And hoping my little scale is pretty accurate. Gotta tell you, I'm not in love with this time of the year. I don't expect to like 2009 until well after April 15th.

Going through my ginormous and ever growing stash of jewelry supplies has given me lots of (hopefully) neat ideas for pieces, only I'm not allowing myself to make ANYthing new that is not requested by a customer until I finish counting inventory. For someone who hasn't had her muse around in quite some time, this is quite the frustrating experience!

But this too shall pass, and then I shall have some pretty new things to show you. I've also found an awesome new supplier that has some components I've been wanting for a very long time. I plan to snag some of those goodies pretty quickly and see what I can do with them. I have a few ideas!

I think in 2009, one of my biggest goals is to simplify things. I'm *extremely* unorganized, which is one reason why this inventory/tax thing takes me so dadgum long. Well, that, and I haven't shut down shop, so I'm juggling working on filling orders during the afternoon and doing the paperwork into the wee hours of the night. However, If I had been entering invoices into the computer all year, I would be done by now. But noooo. I wait until the last minute. I *need* to organize my business paperwork - both incoming and outgoing - in a major way this year because I simply do not have enough time to waste on being unorganized anymore and that will not be helped at all with a baby whenever that happens (though I'm thinking it might never happen anyway!). I think the solution here is two-fold. One, get the inventory program that my dad is writing for me finished and two, schedule one day a month where I require myself to sit down and play catch up for all the not-yet-done paperwork for the month. Every month, without fail, no excuses.

People, I need accountability. Bug me at the end of every month. Call me. Text me. Email me. Show up at my door with chocolate and sit down with me and help me. Whatever you do, make me do this! Hello. Me. Desperate!! I also plan to roll out a more simple jewelry line. Not so much simple as in "oh, wow, boring" but more like can be made and reproduced easily. I won't completely get rid of my cool-as-heck-metalsmithing-skillz-yo labor intensive work, but I need to have a line that does not take hours upon hours upon hours to replenish. I don't want to raise all my prices higher, so I need to do this if I don't want to go crazy in '09. And I'm already halfway there as you well know, so... yeah.

I'm also in semi freak out mode with our house. Our flooring project is all but complete. Really all that's lacking is quarter-round on the baseboards, a couple threshholds, and some painting on the trim. Yay! We bought a ton more flooring than we needed. We also wasted a lot of flooring making mistakes! *grin* But even still, we saved so much money buying from an overstock warehouse (bought a really good name brand of really thick flooring too - SO cheap!) and doing the work ourselves. Sure, it took half a year, but hey, that freed up money to buy the finer, more important things in life - like chocolate. And iPhones.

Even though the flooring is all but complete, there is still so much to do to make our house acceptable-to-Crystal-baby-ready. Oh.My.Might.Die.NOW. We spent a couple of days gutting the garage room of all the junk that had accumulated in there. People. We're talking BAGS of stuff to be recycled, thrown away, and donated. Major purging going on here. I even finally got rid of my pregnancy and birth books. I had quite a few. I bought all the good ones that all the crunchy people recommended. I even read a couple. They were hard to let go. I'm not sure why. I guess because it was like the last thing we had laying around that offered any kind of hope for carrying a child. I mean, they all talk about pregnancy and childbirth like it's a given... but it's not. I'm finally okay with that, but getting rid of the books took me this long. An entire year and a half since we learned we would never conceive. That's quite a long time. Unfortunately, we took them to a second hand book store and got pennies for them when I probably could have sold them online for a much better deal (I paid pretty pennies for them used - they're not super cheap books - in demand I guess) but I just wanted them goneNOWitsTIME-kthx. So gone they are. Now I just have a lone pregnancy test remaining in my bathroom cabinet. I actually completely forgot about it until right now. Maybe I'll do some kind of ceremonial burning of it. Or maybe I'll bury it, water it, and watch to see if it grows us a baby. Do babies grow on trees?

Back to the house. Now that the garage is mostly cleaned and purged, it seriously needs to be organized. SERIOUSLY. Things are now in boxes on the floor. I want everything OFF of the floor that is not a piece of furniture. I'm through with clutter. I don't like stepping over things to get to my freezer, nor do I like risking my life just to get to my massive supply of bubble mailers and jewelry boxes. So our next "project" will be to get some kind of shelving system(s) in there, move some stuff around (my bench will be scooted over and the freezer will be moved closer to the door) and get stuff organized. I can't wait for this to happen. It's been a long time coming.

Last month we put two desks in the office. It took me half of the year to pick them out (and if you think I'm joking, just ask Dustin. They should have been bought in July.) Actually, I had picked some out from Wal-Mart sooner and an hour after I put them into my cart to purchase them (free site-to-store shipping), they decided they weren't carrying them anymore. NOT.HAPPY.CAMPER. I gave them a week or two to change their minds because, well, that was just rude!

*tick, tock, tick, tock*

But they did not. So I "pulled up my big girl panties" (though to be honest, I'm not quite sure why they were down to begin with... I mean, I don't usually shop sans panties. That's kinda sick. Shame on you for coming up with that one.) and shopped at my arch nemesis, Target. Oh yes. Target. We do not like The Targets anymore. Ooooh no. But that's another story for another day.

We bought the desks from Target cause they were cheap and they are beautiful. For months I had been trying to run a business on a tiny little printer table. Oh my. My skinny monitor hardly fit, much less all the other stuff I needed to be functional. Not fun. Not fun at all. But that's all in the past and now I run my busines from one of our two cheap but beautiful desks. They're a deep dark espresso color with a hint of red tones. I can't believe they were selling solid wood desks for so cheap. Maybe Target is not so bad afterall. Now we're in the second phase of the office project.

Do you see a problem here - multiple projects all at once? Flooring? Office? Garage? Nursery? Eating? Keeping sane? Breathing? Running business? Staying alive? Pulling up panties?

NO WONDER I'm exhausted!

The second phase is putting together bookcases. Or watching my dad put together bookcases while chatting his ear off, really. He's so good to me. Love my daddy! SO excited about organizing the office. Soooo excited.

Next is finishing the garage and the nursery. Then my life might be semi back to normal... well, if it's after April 15th that is. Or maybe I'll never be normal. I have my doubts. But if not normal, then at least hopefully organized and safe for a little one who may or may not ever find his or her way into our home.

Happy weekend, bloggy buds.