Gold and Sand

I have a confession.  I am a piler.  I love to be organized.  I love for things to look pretty.  But I'm lazy.  We almost always have mail piled somewhere.  The table in the front hall.  The kitchen table.  The kitchen counter.  And it drives me batty.  I try to at least consolidate the piles down to one place, the front hall table.  Because obviously, nothing is more welcoming when you come home than a giant pile of mail.

Last summer I made a pretty tray to hold the mail.  That was ridiculous.  It just meant the pile spilled over the tray.  So, when we had people over the other day, it lit a fire under my bum, I had to do something.  My sweet husband told me I didn't need to clean, that nobody would care.  I gave him my best Monica Gellar look that said, "No, people I do not know cannot come over when our house looks like this."  Oh wait, I may have said that out loud.  You know, there are people that can come over when your house is in any state, other people you need to do the crazy fast panic clean.  And then act like your house is always that clean...

Okay, so I tackled that stupid table.  I sorted the mail.  Almost all of it got shredded.  Some of the junk mail just got tossed in the recycling and the rest of it got piled in the laundry room to be dealt with at a later time.  And I shut the laundry room door because that's the mess that I'm still in serious denial about.  It's bad guys.  Really bad.

So I made the table pretty.  If it's pretty I hopefully won't want to ruin the pretty with piles of mail.  Right?  Right?  Somebody please tell me this will work.

 

In case you're curious, this also doubles as our liquor cabinet.  Sneaky, right?  Oh that just looks so much better.

 A close up.  The vase is one I spray painted gold the other day.  It was leftover from our wedding.  The flowers in it are ones that lived on our mantle in the spring.  The bowl is part of a set we got as a wedding present and holds my keys.  And the square vase full of sand and shells has sand from Gulf Shores, AL courtesy of my parents.  Mainly because I was a dummy and didn't bring home any sand from our vacation.  And the shells are from the beach in Siesta Key, FL from our vacation.  The perfect pretty combination of things to see when I come home.

But where did all the mail I actually needed to keep (silly bills) go?  Not far, it just moved to the laundry room.  I hung up a wall organizer and threw in a couple of file folders.  One for mailing supplies like envelopes, address labels, and stamps.  One for bills to be paid.  And one for things to file.  Right underneath is a paper recycling bin and the shredder.

 

I also have a small cork board and a wipe off calendar board.

What do you think?  Is this going to be the end of my mail struggles?  I'm trying to make myself deal with the mail as soon as I walk in the door.  It doesn't get set down anywhere, it either goes in the bin or gets shredded/recycled.