clear the clutter

Spring fever has hit me hard lately. All the little piles of clutter here and there are really starting to bug me lately. I kind of go through cycles that way, they'll bother me for awhile and I'll try to do something about it, then I'll let it go while I move onto the next problem... but not much seems to actually get done. I feel like I'm sweeping a big pile of dirt from room to room, but never actually putting it in the dustpan. One major cause of annoyance in our household is the pile o' papers on the kitchen counter. Here is what this corner of our kitchen counter looks like 75% of the time:

Well, minus the iron and ironing board, that is usually put away. But I'm all about keeping it real and it was on the counter when I went to take this picture, so there you go.
And here's what our little command center looks like 100% of the time:

You might recognize this section of wall from {this} post. I had to switch it up a little bit so we could try to keep things organized out here.

You can tell how well that's worked out so far.

But I'm working on clearing the clutter out so I picked up some cute metal organizers the other day while I was at Target. Three came in a set, one said "mail", on said "magazines", and on e just said "stuff". I tried really hard to find it on their website so I could share it with you, but I couldn't, so here it is on my wall:

I thought about what our needs were for that space. Honestly, did I really need an area to stack papers to shred? For crying out loud, we have a shredder sitting on our counter top! Anything that needs to get shred should just go right in, it takes like 10 seconds. And really, it makes no sense whatsoever to walk all the way into the bedroom to get a stamp when  the vast majority of the time we're taking care of addressing and stamping items in the kitchen! And my kids are finally at the age where they're coloring cute things for me and since our fridge isn't magnetic, I had no good spot to post them, so I really needed to clear that board off so there was space for their artwork (I need to get around to making a couple of {these}).

I wish I had taken care of that messy corner sooner because it makes me feel so much better seeing it straightened up! It's only been a couple weeks but so far it's still looking great and I've been able to sort and shred things right away instead of letting them sit around messing up my happy. :)