The Transformation of a Mess to a Nursery

Does anyone else have a secret room in their house where all of their junk goes to die?  No?  Just us?

Well we definitely have one of those.  We live in a cozy 3-bedroom home and our room and our guest room stay pretty "clean" (this is a very relative term for us) most of the time.  But the office.  Oh, the office.  This is truly the "dumping grounds" of sorts.  It has undergone renovations several times and been clean and livable at certain times, I think as recently as summer 2012.

But then I got a new job, and the office I'd had for 5 years filled with TONS of papers, books, and seriously BOXES of dissertation data needed a new home.  So it simply got transported from my office to the house and dumped in this room.  Then Christmas happened, and any new items were also dumped in this room.  Finally, we had a few guests come to stay, so any extra clutter throughout the rest of the house was also discarded here so the rest of the house would look cleaner.

So, yeah.  A picture says a thousand words:

This is embarrasing.

So thus began the very horrible task of transforming that complete mess into a lovely, peaceful, serene, livable nursery. 

Maybe even something kind of sort of like this (found on Pinterest of course):

source

But there's a long way to go to get to that.  Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Step 1: Move the actual office-related mess to a new area of the house.  This:

Became this:

Step 2: Move other stuff to the new shelves in our bedroom we built in December:

Step 3: Take a RIDICULOUS amount of stuff to Goodwill.  Hello tax write-off.

Step 4: Never give up, and never surrender, even though this task seems to take up your entire life every weekend for a month.  This is mid-way through the process:

Step 5: Relish in your accomplishment and all your hard work!!!

And yes - we bought a crib!  Our first big purchase awaits in that big box. 

Whew.  Apparently we belong on that show Hoarders or something.  Anyone else have secret spaces where they stash all their crap inappropriately?  Also, who wants to come over and help us paint?!