Is it spring cleaning? Or just organizing?

With the nice weather we've been having I've spent more time over in the black trailer. It gets pretty warm in there and the air conditioner has no controls other than high/low, so it can get pretty cold. But lately I've been able to leave the door open and just run a fan. I love it! So with all my time spent in there I have been organizing. Serious, deep cleaning type organizing. I have too much stuff! :(

I've been wanting to do some scrapbooking, but I just didn't know where I was going to start. So I did what comes natural to me - I organized.

I've been bringing home boxes of pictures every time I come home from Michigan. So I dug right in.

The first day I just laid the boxes out in order by date, making notes of anything missing. And I am missing some pictures. :(

The next day I started opening the boxes and going through them, just to orient myself with what was where and to get a grip on what was extra copies and what needed to go into photo albums. As far as I can tell I only have one year - 2000 - that needs to go into books first. Plus I had tons of negatives! I had thought I'd already taken care of these, but apparently not. I do know I have all the negatives up through 1997 for sure, maybe 1998, in a negative book, which unfortunately, I did not find last time I was in the storage unit.

So of course my nest step is to tackle all those negatives. I happened to grab some negative sleeves from storage, lucky me, so I ripped them open and got to work. I started with 2000, since that's the year I have everything in one place. Then I worked my way backwards. Yeah, I know, doesn't make sense. I didn't see that I had older negatives when I got started. Anyway, it all worked out. So now I have negatives from Christmas 1998 all the way through 2000 all in sleeves. That's done.

From there I don't know where the rest of the negatives are. I didn't switch to digital until 2003. So? No clue. But I'm not stressing over it, cause I know I have some more in storage up north.

With all the negatives out of the way, I went through and placed index cards with notes for dates and places, etc., between the sections of pictures. This will help a lot when I get ready to scrap. I got rid of all those envelopes - especially since those are really bad for your pictures.

At some point I started pulling out pictures I wanted to scrap. I have lots of stories running around in my head! :D So now I have a box of pictures staring at me every time I sit at my desk.

But, before I could start scrapping I had to organize my stuff first! :D I have so much paper and stickers, so many little thingys to punch and decorate with! It's all been shoved into a suitcase, so that makes it hard to sift through for the item you're looking for. Plus, you don't see everything, so you don't know you have it!

So yesterday I stacked all the picture boxes out of the way and cleared off my desk and got it organized. Then I pulled out my big suitcase of paper and started organizing that, too! I sorted all my patterned paper into color groups and kept my solid cardstock separate. Then I decided to take apart those books of paper I keep buying. When they're in the books you don't always see what's there. So I took them apart and wrote in a corner on the back what company made it and set it aside. Today sometime I will sort them by color and add them to the patterned paper stacks.

I'm really making some progress!

soon...very soon, I'll be one scrap-happy fool!