Lesson learned.

Good grief.  I'm really glad that I cleaned my desk off on Thursday.  This is a tale of before, during and after.  And I'll cut to the moral of the story: Don't be stupid, Stupid :P

So, this is a picture of my desk shortly after we got settled, taken in the beginning of July:

And that's basically the set up I've been running with. I took the Ott light off, because I just didn't need it.  I also don't ever put my laptop on top of the desk anymore.  Real estate is just too precious, so for entertainment I use my Kindle instead, and I put the laptop on a tall chair off to the side for my Silhouetting.

My desk is a vintage drafting table that I got about 18 years ago when we lived in Indiana.  My oldest had sort of taken it over and trashed it, and when we moved I reclaimed it and refinished it.  For weeks I couldn't walk past it without running my hand over the top and asking "Isn't she pretty?"  Yes.  I love it.

BUT, it's a drafting table.  It's meant to have a couple of sheets of paper on it.  NOT all the stuff that I had piled on top of it.  And, as a drafting table, the table can be raised and lowered and the top swings up - drafting is often done  with the table top angled up.  The combined affect of these facts is that the whole dern thing shifts around.

So I've put stuff across the back part, which has probably put more pressure there than it can handle. And over the last couple of weeks I've noticed the whole thing dropping down a little bit at a time.  So I asked Ted and Kerig to lift up the top, and I was going to put some old kid's building blocks under the legs so that top couldn't drop down again.  For whatever reason, I didn't think I needed to take everything off the top.  The good news is, I just cleaned my desk on Thursday so it was very close the way it looks in the picture up there.

The bad news is, this was a stupid decision on my part and everything ended up on the floor:

Oops.  Fortunately nothing broke.  And I would have preferred to just raise and reinforce the desk as we had originally planned.  But instead, I got to reorganize.  Never mind that I had just done this on Thursday.  I did decide that I needed to get a lot of weight off the back side of the desk, so now it looks like this:

One of the things that I love about my table is that it's tall enough for me to scrapbook standing up, which I prefer.  One of the benefits of scrapbooking standing up is that you don't have to have everything right there - walking four feet is no big deal when you're already up.  So tonight I just reevaluated what I needed at my fingertips. The black thing is a lazy Susan thingee (TJ Maxx $10 - l♥ve) and it has scissors (multiple pair, because they're so easy to lose), basic hand punches, tweezers, pokers (like for making a hole for brads), Zig glue pens, my Basic Grey file set and my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher.   The red box has current pictures and a my (teeny, tiny, minuscule) collection of acrylic stamps.  They don't need to be at my fingertips, but I hope to remember to use them if they're there.  The round silver thing is my small bucket of flair.  My Fridgebinz box of adhesive is a must-keep-close item for certain.  The white Making Memories thing has all kinds of pens, paint brushes, lens and stamp cleaners, my ATG gun, SEI buttons that rarely get used but make me happy, and then the little drawers hold extra blades for my trimmer, CM circle cutter blades, Tiny Attacher refills, o-rings and teeny bits.

This was not how I had planned to spend my evening.  But that's okay.  I've been meaning to make some adjustments and this helped that.

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope to have some thing more directly scrapbook related soon. ☺
Have a great week!

And don't forget: Don't be stupid, Stupid ;)