Office Organization

On Mondays, I usually try to plan out my week ahead. This has been helpful to pass the time and keep myself busy and focused with Chris out of town. Sometimes it's as banal as what day I think I might want to vaccuum, to which dogs to give baths to this week. Sometimes it's a little more jammed with painting the headboard one night, distressing the furniture, and getting the house ready for guests!

This week, I think I'm going to start working on getting our office more organized. Right now, it's a mess (much like how our guest bedroom was), and I'd like to make it more of a functioning part of our house. I have visions of something like this:

Do you see all that order??? It's beautiful.

Martha's own personal "crafts room" (wouldn't it be nice?) looks to be the picture of organizations too, naturally. I love Martha (I really do), and I wouldn't be ashamed to call this my office:

The biggest problem that I see is that lots of the "stuff" in the office belongs to Chris. It's easy to go through and organize your own things, but I'm still trying to navigate how to best go through and organize his things in a way that he will like. A big black trashbag would be my way of dealing with a bunch of the mess (both his and mine), but I can't do that with his things without talking to him about it first.

Kinda throws a wrench into the whole 'getting-on-a-roll and just getting-it-done'. I can't just do that, I need to discuss some things I'd like to do with him - it's his office too.

Combining households and "stuff" has been one of the hardest things about getting married, I think. It's especially hard because we're both stubborn, and we were both kind of set in our ways before we met. So it can be *fun*, at times... but we're getting better at communicating and working together on things.

Have any tips or advice?