The Winners are….
1st Place : David Dietz – In my opinion, it looks like he had a LOT of work to do and the results were great! And anyone that vacuums their ceiling fan get extra points in my book! ;o)
2nd Place : Jason Trimble – Even though his pictures were pretty grainy and dark, I could make out the ‘junk room’ mess that he had to clean. Love the sweeper parked next to the computer desk in the before picture! The only way I could really make out where the desk was in the before pic was seeing the Blue LEDs. Wow, big improvement!
3rd Place : Aspen d’Grey – Although his link to the site with even more pictures times out when I try to visit, I can tell that he did some major cleaning because the items on the bookcase in the before and after pictures are different. :o)
Thanks to everyone that entered. I’m sure your efforts will not go unrewarded by the people you share your space with. :o)
Here are all the submissions for the Spring Clean 2007 contest thus far! Get your entry in before 05/20! Click here for contest details.
Julie Strietelmeier (The Gadgeteer)
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This isn’t a real entry, I just wanted to give an example. Gadgeteer HQ was a mess this morning, so I buckled down and spent about 30 minutes cleaning it up. Looks a lot better now doesn’t it? Let’s see your before and after shots now!
1. Lipman
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2. Colin Taekema
Here is my entry for the Spring Cleaning Contest. My office is combined with my bedroom, mostly due to the fact that I’m in college and don’t get more than one room. Check out the pics.
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3. Gerald Tan
My tests just ended recently and I decided to take a picture of my study room before proceeding to clean out everything. It was well worth the half and hour spent because my Mom does not nag at me to clear my study room anymore! Now i’m off to clear my bedroom =)
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4. Mark Rosengarten
The OQO in the After picture sits upon a docking station I built from Legos, with a built-in 4-port USB hub. Thank you for inspiring me to decrease the entropy of my office! 🙂
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5. CityDomain
I decided to clear up my study! It was thick with dust and covered in all my old gadgets. My computer from the kitchen has now been moved into the study, and my girlfriend wants you to have a competition for a house cleaning!
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6. Jeffrey Young
I’m a total gadget freak and this contest is just what i needed to cleanup my messy work area. If you notice there’s the HP TX1000 you reviewed. The review really helped in picking it 😀
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7. cgmees
Here is my attempt to clean up. I hope it lasts longer then the last time, but you never know what will end up in front of me for weeks on end until I do something about it!
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8. Eric Dey
Returning home in the middle of two-month out-of-town work assignment I discovered that the rumors were true — my home office was a disaster. Good news is that the longevity of the contest clean-up is guaranteed for at least a month, as that’s when I return home for good.
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9. Deni Tako
Wow. This was a task and a half! I envy the folks who could get this done in hours… it took me 3 days! (But to be fair, that was for the whole room, not just the desk.) Not shown in the photo are all the closet and cabinets that also got cleaned out, and reorganized!
I disconnected every single AC adapter and plug, and went labeler crazy, and labeled every cord, on both ends… this way, I will know what to plug in and what is connected. That by itself took a couple of hours… I even found out my monitor has speakers in it. I probably knew that once upon a time, but now, my Belkin TuneSync uses that connection to play my iPod while I sit at my desk without having to use any other speakers to take up more room!
With the creative use of Velcro, I was able to mount my speakers and the wireless receivers for the mouse and keyboard, where they are not sitting on the desktop.
I also mounted the major surge protectors behind the desk, trying to get screws in upside down and in a 5 inch space was a trick, but we got there eventually!
Also previously unused was the keyboard drawer on the desk, now this holds my laptop until I want to use it, and then holds the keyboard (for the desktop) while the laptop is on the desk. I was able to get rid of the whole folding table with this solution. Yippee!
I added a whole accessory area on the right, which has all the different types of media I use in labeled 10 disc spindles, my Sonic Impact V55, my cell phone desktop charger, and all the retractable cables for my other various devices, so I can pop them onto the TuneSync only when I need them, rather than keeping cables everywhere, along with a few miscellaneous office supplies.
This was a ton of work, and I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to be DONE. Thanks for the contest, and good luck to all who enter!
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10. Aspen d’Grey
Here’s my ‘office’ after 4 years in the same place with no major cleaning, ever.
I took a lot of photos of all this, both more before & afters and al ot while I was cleaning, you can check them out at http://www.greydawning.net
It took me about 8 hours of steady work… I plugged in an extra set of speakers and had at it. I very recently reorganized and cleaned the table that actually serves as my desk, so it wasn’t a huge problem, some soda spills, bit of rewiring in the back, getting rid of the collected junk and sorting out the ‘tip jar’ (The bowl with odds & ends that I dont like to hunt for) and pen jar, but it doesn’t collect a lot of paper because I use it for a drafting surface.
Here was the challenge for me: I absolutely COULD NOT turn off the main computer or disconnect it from the internet… Oh, that made for some VERY interesting bits while relocating the router & power strips.
You cant really appreciate how bad this was without going to the site and looking at some of the pics… I pulled off tons and tons of stuff from the bookshelf and under the desk, and spent about 2 hours cleaning out each of the big green bins… Those were a nightmare! The comptuer on the bookshelf is still backwards because it’s my peripheral test machine, and having easy access to the back is a lot mmore important than putting in the occasional CD or floppy. All of my games and books got matched and sorted and shelved, along with the CDs, floppys, and zip disks. All of my hardware boxes for the stuuff currently in my main computer is on top of the bookshelf now, and the old stuff is in the trash. (Yay!) The plastic 3-shelf rolly cart got reorganized so that the top shelf is hardware manuals & driver CDs, the middle is paper (sorted into plain & photo), and the bottom is filled up with Bawls. Yum.
The wiring is still ‘interesting’ and ducttaped to the desk because, frankly, it’s the best system I’ve found to routing wires in under a desktop like that. The desk itselfi s a 9′ banquet table that I comandeered after my last one broke under the weight of 6 monitors. The wiring looks pretty bad in the last ‘after’ photo, but, it’s not at all tangled- it just isn’t pretty. Any of the cables can be easily plugged and unplugged.
The area hadnt been cleaned up fully in the 4 years I’ve been using it…. One of these pics illustrates the dust on the shelves- on the left I’ve jsut wiped it down and the other has maybe a 1/8th inch of dust. Many, many dust bunnies were harmed in the making of this production.
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11. Craig Huang
Big Toys for Big Boys!! The number of toys that ended up in my office is obviously a little exaggerated, but I often do find toys in various places around my office and my web browser looking at various toy and cartoon sites. My boys definitely helped clean up the area and earned some money with that chore!
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12. Michael Flynn
Hey now!
Clutter and dust and dust and dust.
I went with a full-room cleanup as well. This has been my office for the last 5 years. I used to run a Windows (98!) pc in this desk and I was shocked, *shocked*, at how much software I still had floating around for that thing. Especially since I made the Mac move back in 2003.
I replaced my printer and added a scanner to the mix.
I found a nice, out of the way spot for the slow moving but ever growing lp-to-mp3 conversion project.
Bookshelves full of 45’s, graphic novels, actual novels, and reference materials have some room to breathe.
My Guitar Hero controller is well out of harm’s way.
Homework (for the 1st grader) is now 94% less dusty
And I filled 4 grocery bags full of pc junk. It’s a nice feeling.
Thanks for the encouragement (and the gadget reviews).
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13. Mike Farwell
I began working on cleaning my desk, and my wife decided let’s move the office to a different room and turn this room into a storage room. So after spending the whole weekend switching furniture around and move stuff here is the result as far as my desk goes. (We’re still working on the rest of the house, but we’re getting close.) Thanks for helping motivate me to get this project going.
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14. Daniel Chun
Here is my entry for the spring cleaning contest.
I was putting this off for too long. The contest gave me enough motivation to get up and get my desk organized. My card readers and external drives are now visible.
In the process I was able to find a place to put my second laptop. So even if I don’t win anything I at least have that.
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15. Rex Barre
Behold the before and after pictures of my computer office. In truth, it was a real mess, and, like Deni, once I started on the desk the whole room had to be straightened out.
I evicted the tool bags that I use from the storage area on the right (that my old-school, bulletproof PC case won’t fit) and added some shelves to house my laptops when they aren’t needed (but I can still plug them into power for charging and into my KVM switch as needed through slots in the back). I then just went through everything and if I didn’t need it or use in within the past six months, out it went. I also took this time to perform some needed repairs to the desk, re gluing the filing drawers and a support area with Gorilla glue and a ratcheting tie down strap.
I now have space to set up my work and play laptops, a place to store everything, and even found a use for my wife’s potpourri crock-pot (it heats up peanuts in the shell wonderfully!)
Thanks very much for the contest; it helped really motivate me to cleaning this place up.
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16. Jason Trimble
Hey Julie! So the work is FINALLY done! as I promised, here’s what a little determination and a cool contest can achieve! I have the pics that we talked about earlier in the email below.
As you can see,…the before cleanup pictures tell the tale, Of a very sad sad cramped man banished to a storage room. Okay so Imagine after seeing that,…… It only took a day to get it to the aftercleanup photos. To tell the truth It actually looked worse than that before I took the photos, but I kinda ran into your contest after I had started the work a week earlier. One very long night and a early morning after,….volla!!!!! a storage room slash sad,…. sad,…. corner office turns into an art studio plus an office fit for a Marketing Director.
The aftercleanup photo #2 is the left side of an attempted panoramic, the #3 being the right of that photo. I don’t have the program to merge them,… so,.. I figured you could get the general drift. All of those paintings are my own works,…. and instead of just doing a computer room it is also an art studio now! Pictures do no justice honestly,the room was revamped with an oriental flair,…
and is now filled with aromas of vanilla and lavender, with candles and full-spectrum lighting ( for the paintings ) and is so relaxing, it now has become the “place to be!” My wife is SO happy, And so am I, thank you for the idea,…this would have taken a month, but we had a push and a cause……. Thank you so much.
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17. David Dietz
Here are the fruits of my labors. It has taken a month to get it done and has resulted in over 500 pounds of stuff being thrown away, recycled and/or stored for further perusal and distribution.
While doing all of this I was able to avoid any outages of the various servers and workstations in the room while rerouting necessary cables (and removing some that didn’t actually go anywhere).
I think my wife finally declared victory over the shambles for me when our 4-year old daughter was able to come in and do a summersault in the open floor. She has never known this room to have more than a few square feet of open space in this room since she was born, and little does she know it has rarely had more than that since about a week after we moved into the house 7 years ago.
I even vacuumed the ceiling fan. 🙂
Thanks for the inspiration.
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18. Ron Tatum
Well, I just got home from college a few days ago, and my computer desk was
filthy. I had been using it as a shelf when I came home to visit, and by the
time I got back, it looked like some kind of tornado had hit it. It took a
while to clean up, but mostly because I had to find places for everything. The
spare computer parts were moved upstairs to be with the desktop, since they
obviously don’t belong with my laptop. The random books were moved to a
bookcase that I have moved into my room, near my desk.
You can’t see it from the pictures, but there were stacks of books next to the
desk, and a beta fish on top of them. The books are now in the bookcase with
the others, and the Beta is on top of the shelf with some model airplanes.
There were also some paintings that my girlfriend had made for me that I
decided to hang up around the area. There were lots of wires under the desk
that looked like some kind of jungle, but I sorted them and tied them off using
cable ties. There are still a lot of wires, but now they look neater and
provide less of a trap for the dog if she climbs under there again.
Most everything else went into drawers and organizers in the closet. The clothes
were washed, and the fedora and tie are both back in the closet with my suit.
Through all of that, I found two missing SD cards for my camera, three missing
Gameboy and DS games, eighteen dollars, and a Playstation. Add those to the
wonderful feeling of having a clean desk and being able to use my wireless
mouse again, and I feel like I have already won first prize! Thanks for the
motivation!
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19. Maria Andrusiak Morland
As a work at home mom of 2, my dining room is my desk, our playroom,
our media centre, and my business office. Only rarely do we get to
eat in this room. I run a rental company, and a consulting business
out of this amount of space, with toddler toys underneath. Time to
clean up!! The laptop’s been living under the couch for the past 3
months to stay away from little feet, the printer drawer was pulled
out because I hadn’t run the cables properly and it couldn’t be
pushed in, the storage had just been shoved and shoved and shoved
some more… I have the bruises from getting hit TWICE by falling
junk during this cleaning!
I filed every business receipt. Filled a bag of garbage and
recycling, and cleaned up the things on top of the top of the
shelves. You can’t see the clean drawers, the proper files, and the
sense of calm that at least ONE surface of my house is clean.
Thank you desk, I know you can talk, but can you keep yourself clean
this time!
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20. Ian M. Sacklow
this is a before and after of a section of my workspace at my day job.
the workbench is about 14′ long with a great space along the back to
run cables. the mess shown was only from a few days worth of repairs
and projects.
the overall workspace/office has gone through many stages of
reorganization and cleanups over the past 2-4 years since we moved
into the new office space. i really wish i had pictures of the place
before i was able to put in the adjustable metal shelves off to the
left of the cat pictures.
a lot of the containment units were either left over floppy containers
(the 5.25″ ones work great for computer cards – networking / sound /
video / etc) or they were purchases made at the dollar store (that’s
where the mini colored crates came from) or from a local craft shop
(clear containers for misc adapters and screws).
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