The choice of which blog to continue seemed a very obvious to me since this site runs days with no visitors. I would regularly get Google summaries telling me that no one has visited the site. That is likely due to the long periods of time between blog posts. This is a well known way of killing a blog, and it has certainly killed this one.

My love for organizing hasn’t changed so on Ryan & Peggy I will still write about organizing tips and things I’ve done in our home to keep our posessions neat and orderly.

Part-time blogging is much harder than I originally thought. It’s challenging to find that extra hour or two to write and read other blogs, comment on other blogs, read my stats. It’s a lot to do when you only have a few hours a week to do it, and if I have to do it twice as much for two blogs, things just don’t get done. My time would be better spent focusing on one and promoting it.

Feel free to read over and print any articles you find on the site but after a while I will be removing it completely from the world wide web.

I would love if you could check out my other website Ryan & Peggy and sign-up for it’s RSS feed so you can follow my wife and I as we go through this crazy obstacle course we call life.

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I just found out that my wife is pregnant with our first child so I have decided to go through all the areas of our home that stuff has been stored and unused to decide if we need it any longer.  If we don’t need it then we will give it away, sell it or throw it out but the key is to remove it from our home.  That is what will allow us to have more space and much more flexibility.  Also since we will be getting baby furniture, baby clothes and many other things for our new child we will need to remove stuff to allow for it.

We are a recently married couple so we have stuff in our home that we each accumulated while we were single and that means we have two of almost everything and have not yet “combined” our possessions completely.  So this means we have too much stuff in our home and we need to get rid of some of it.  In our home we have a lot of storage space (fortunately AND unfortunately) so we’ve been able to hide it well but the time has now come to go through all the boxes to give away what we no longer use or need.

If you are looking for anything in particular for your home, just let me know and I’ll see if we do plan to get rid of it, it’ll be yours.

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I was thrilled to know that I got to use the Blackberry for 10 months for $25 (the price of the warranty).  But unfortunately, I had to go without my time management tool.  I didn’t realize how dependent on it I had become.  For the next while I was late and forgetting about my appointments.  I didn’t like that I was becoming less reliable and had to regularly apologize for my lack of punctuality.

During this time I was researching different units that would suit my needs and desires.  I wanted a unit that had a decent organizer as well as wifi so I coud check my email without having to pay for data.  Some Blackberry’s offered this but were much too expensive.  The Blackberry Pearl with Wifi had just come out but still was not available to the general public so that was not an option.  Also, most smartphones or PDA’s available with Wifi capabilities were close to $500 if I bought them unlocked (which I wanted to do since I could care less about the phone feature).

Then my coworker told me the full functionality of his iPod Touch.   It is essentially a Wifi device but nothing beyond that because it is basically the iPhone without the calling capabilities.  I absolutely fell in love with it because it met all the criteria that I wanted in an electronic organizer and Wifi device.  The only downside was that they were around $300 for the 8GB unit.  This was way too much for me because I didn’t have that kind of money to blow on an organizer.

After about a month of wishing and saving, we had receieved a letter in the mail congratulating us because we had won a 16GB iPod Touch with a carrying case (it was actually my wife who won it).  The contest that we won it from was one we entered 5 months earlier, so we had completely forgotten that we entered it.  We were happy and surprised at the same time because it had approximately a $525 value.  The notice came out of nowhere.

So I have been using it for about 2 and a half months now and I think it’s wonderful.  It is exactly what I wanted and needed in terms of an organizer and Wifi device.  We have wireless at home and I also have it at work so I have access 90% of the time.  It is a great little unit that has become almost a necessity in my life.  I say “almost” because I’m sure I could live without it but it is becoming so handy and useful that it will take some adjusting to live without it.  My next post will be a review of the iPod Touch and I’ll share all the features about it that I love.

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In the process we found some of my wife’s clothes that she had been missing and had the opportunity to put away her winter clothes that was taking up space in the closet. The whole process took us several hours but it was worth it. As a result we also organized half of the drawers in our dresser to become more usable by sorting them to contain a certain style or group of clothing.

The whole process took a few hours and my wife and I are very pleased with the outcome. That side of the closet has a lot more space and all the items are easily found and put away. It’s great. I personally love to organize because if it is done well then you reap the benefits for much longer than it takes to organize it. Our closet was in desperate need of some rework because it was just a constant mess but now as long as things are put away, it is in a constant state of tidiness, a good state to be in.

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Organizing is too much work
If your home isn’t organized then getting it there isn’t an easy task. For most of us, including myself, we find that organizing say, a bedroom closet, takes too much time that we don’t have. It may be true that we don’t have that much time to organize the closet but do we really have time to do other things, like say watch hockey or basketball, or wash the car? A person may give other tasks a higher priority so we put it off but doing these things do not get it organized.

In order for someone to actually perform the task of organizing the bedroom closet we need to place it as a higher priority. We only get out the effort we put in. Fortunately, we don’t have to do the entire closet or the entire kitchen at once. We can choose to do it in small sections (like say, half the closet or two cupboards in the kitchen) It doesn’t have to be long. The whole process of organization does take longer but at least progress is being made. If we don’t organize even a little bit, then no progress is being made.

Putting the organization of your home as a higher priority and only doing a small amount at a time will let you have an organized home in no time. That is why the slogan for this website it “Get Organized, One Day At A Time”. As we try to balance work, school, family and other aspects of life, there isn’t much time left over for organizing, that is why it is important to do a little bit at a time.

We don’t have the money!
I think this is a perfectly legitimate reason. To be honest, this is the limiting factor in our home. We are recently married living in an apartment without a great deal of extra money because we are trying to pay off our student loans. We don’t have very much money to spend on purchasing new furniture or items that will help us unclutter our home so if something needs to be tidied, it has to be done in the cheapest way. We set aside $100 each month devoted to items for our home, but this by no means can support all our tidying needs because this also involves any appliances or electronics needed for the home.

There are many things in our lives that are much more important than tidying our home, like spending time with your spouse, attending your kids soccer game, vacationing with the family, or backpacking across Europe, that keeping our home tidy and organized should not cost too much money that we need to restrict these activities. Obviously if we don’t spend any money then nothing will get accomplished but if we budget a little bit each month then we know that we have a little spending money to purchase items that allow us to tidy and/or clean the area we plan to work on. It is a slow process, but hey there’s always tomorrow =)

Organizing shouldn’t be expensive so all my suggestions are, in my opinion, the best possible value for our home or office. I do not promote large expensive useless items because those things just add to the clutter, which is contradicting what I’m trying to promote here.

I hope this helps reveal some reasons why someone may or may not be tidy that will help promote change in our lives to live in a clean, organized and happy home.

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