In the interstice...

...between the hand thing and the flu, I did manage to work more on my Organize The Sewing Room Project. After the fabric shelves, the next thing to tackle was the closets. See, this house was remodeled before we moved in and the owners decided that instead of having one large and two small bedrooms upstairs, they would combine the two smaller bedrooms into one massive master bedroom. At first, we made that larger space the girls' room, but after I started sewing and realized that the lighting in the basement was going to blind me and possibly drive me to a vitamin D deficiency-induced suicide and that the kids only wanted to hang out wherever I was anyway and not in their own designated area, I decided to make that big room upstairs mine. Because it combined two bedrooms, it has three, count 'em, three closets, two of which I use for my sewing stuff and the other for bins of kid toys and bedding stuff. The sewing closets have just been stuffed with haphazard piles, to the point that if I want to put something in one of them, I just open the door a crack, toss the thing in, slam the door closed, and run.

So, for closet number one, I bought a set of metal shelves and had a grand old time assembling them because it involved a lot of whacking things with a rubber mallet. I had to also purchase a rubber mallet, and now that I have one, I don't know how I ever lived without it. Our house is furnished entirely from Ikea, so we had to assemble every damn thing we own and somehow we did this without a rubber mallet. Then, the weekend right before the flu hit, we bought a table and drawer set for the girls to use for homework and art projects and this time we had the magic mallet and I imagine that is what Orville and Wilbur felt like when the wheels left the ground for the first time.

I had already tricked the kids into helping me organize my scraps into colors a while back, but I also needed to do the same to my fat quarters and once again they were happy to assist. However, I had to re-fold every single fat quarter I own in order to get them into the bins I bought, but somehow this activity did not induce any sort of repetitive stress injury. I also found some flat bins that looked like they'd be good for certain works in progress and UFOs and such, and it was looking pretty good:

Except you see how the second shelf has only 10 bins? And how the top has 4? And how the bins are all different on the bottom shelf? THIS WAS UNACCEPTABLE. Seriously, every time I would look at this, my eye would twitch because of the lack of symmetry. But then I got the flu and I couldn't do anything about it and that was absolutely the worst thing about being bedridden for over a week: the fact that I had an unfinished, asymmetrical organization project and I couldn't futz with it.

And it's not like I'm anal about everything. My house looks like a fucking dive all the time because I have neither the time nor the patience to keep everything neat as a pin, and so I live with a great deal of clutter and chaos. Tissue missed the trash can? At least it's near the trash can. Where should you put that very important piece of paper that we will need in order to have money to eat/send the kids to school/continue to own a properly registered vehicle? Why right on top of that big pile of paper that is leaning precariously close to the stove!  Where are your shoes? Well, where were you standing when you last threw them across the room?

But give me a project and I must complete it to my exacting specifications, and until I do so I am obsessed with achieving my desired result. So, once I had the energy to leave the house, I immediately hit Target and scooped up the rest of what I needed.

Oh, thank goodness. That's better. Except, they didn't have any more bins with blue lids so I had to put two with white lids on the middle shelf. And the large bins I got for the bottom won't fit three across so, I have to use the smaller bins for that space, but they don't fill the space quite enough and -

Excuse me. I need to go spend some time on First World Problems and then see if my rubber mallet can do anything about this eye twitch.

UPDATE: Apparently I am not the only person afflicted with this debilitating condition. Kat and I Plead Quilty, this is for you: