by Jen | Oct 27, 2013 | Organizing
Sometimes you must say “when”.
I’ve purged, sorted, purged, labelled, organized, and purged again my kid’s “stuff”. Birthday parties, goody bags, the school lunchtime “store”, gum ball machines, arcade prizes, and the occasional grandparent have all undermined my attempts. It is imperative that my children have these treasures–rubber skelton, 1 inch skateboard, stuffed snake, zombie ninja playing the flute. Fine. I will not label, purge, sort, cajole, sort, move or rearrange. I will buy baskets and dump.
I give up.
Have you fought a good fight? If and ONLY IF you have tried to purge it and organize it and have epically failed then, and only then, can you retreat, withdrawal, surrender. You are not a coward. You have picked your battle wisely my friend. I give you my blessing.
Like things together be damned.
by Jen | Oct 1, 2013 | Organizing
Do you know where your prime real estate is IN your house?
It’s the kitchen cabinets and drawers that are the most accessible. The coat closet. The inside of your bedside table. The storage around your bathroom sink. The areas of your closet that are the easiest to reach. The top of your desk. Your main desk drawer.
So why are your coats and shoes not in the coat closet? Because you are storing small appliances, your vacuum, wrapping paper and board games in it.
Why are your counters constantly cluttered with overflow? Because your cabinets are storing your Christmas dishes…AND your “entertaining dishes” (that you use once or twice a year)…AND your sunscreen…AND 47 cookbooks (45 you NEVER use)…AND a mug collection you started in the 60’s (you also don’t drink coffee).
Your bathroom cabinets are storing toilet paper to get you through the next 14 years….AND all your toiletries are on the counter.
The inside of your bedside tables are storing awards, random paper, artwork from your kids, ticket stubs, purses, and 3 travel alarm clocks (that don’t work). Meanwhile your books, magazines and nighttime paraphernalia are helter skelter.
Your clothes are just NOT in your closet. Well the clothes that fit you aren’t. The ones that are too small, outdated, or you can’t bring yourself to get rid of…THOSE are in the closet. Along with holiday decorations, luggage, blankets, more wrapping paper (oh yeah I’ve been to your house), and a bread maker.
I don’t want to talk about the desk. YOU know.
Walk through your house and look at your prime real estate. What’s inside? Is the stuff that is suppose to be inside of it lurking below it, around it, beside it, or anywhere crazy?
USE your prime real estate for what it is meant for. The stuff you use everyday. Take the stuff out that doesn’t belong and use the storage that is hard to access for the DON’T NEED ON A DAILY BASIS.
Take a pad of post it notes if you need to and walk around and literally label where your items SHOULD go.
OR list all of your storage areas in the house. Garage, coat closet, hall closet, laundry room, armoire in office, wet bar, attic, closet in guest bathroom, guest bedroom closet, built-ins in family room, huge dresser in child’s room…whatever has the capacity to store a lot of stuff (or even a medium amount of stuff). THEN list all of your CATEGORIES of stuff. Christmas dishes, wrapping paper, extra toilet paper, towels, sheets, extra blankets, craft supplies, clothes the kids need to grow into, batteries, small appliances…. AND ASSIGN the categories to places on your list THAT MAKE SENSE. Not willy nilly like now because you were unpacking with a 2 year old and a deadline when you moved in.
Like things together. Purge. Store like things together in a place that makes sense.
And remember your prime real estate.
by Jen | Sep 19, 2013 | Organizing
Remember these?
I’m determined to get this pesky project done that has been living on my to do lists for years. Sort pictures. Just typing that puts me to sleep. I don’t want to do it. BUT what is even more irritating is looking at the boxes of pictures, the envelopes of pictures, the piles of pictures that need to be sorted. I abhor clutter and piles. I keep trying to “organize” how the boxes, envelopes and piles “look”. Maybe a bigger storage bin with label maker tape? Or matching photo boxes with labels “For Album” will make this better. My second son was born in 2007 and somewhere through that pregnancy all ordering of photos ceased. My oldest son has many photo albums to see how he has grown etc… until 2007. My youngest son….nothing. I’m doing this for them and for the sake of my to do list. And for gosh sake if you have any printed pictures of me and our family do not send them! At least not yet.
I have consulted many as to the best way to do this. What I’m looking for is fast. Ain’t nobody got time for scrapbooking. So here’s how this is going down.
Imagine an auctioneer reading the rest. We might as well start now being fast. (Heminaheminahemina)
Put all the pictures that need to be sorted in one place.
Get boxes that you can use to sort the pictures by year–these will only be used temporarily.
Label each box by year–in my case I had boxes from 2005 through 2013.
Label additional box(es) “Friends” or “Extended Family” depending on your needs but keep it to one or two boxes. If we over categorize we will go crazy and this will not get done.
Now what I do is have a marked time on the calendar every Tuesday, for example, from 9-11:00 am. I call my girlfriend, who is doing the same project, the phone is on speaker, the Today show is on, and the coffee mug is full.
Nesting Spot for Picture Dump
I pick up a stack of pictures and start dumping them by year. Don’t know the year? Guess. Better than the mess you’ve got now.
When time’s up I clean up and do this again the following week.
Clean Up
Make sure the boxes stay labelled by year. Stack it up and stash it out of sight until your next appt slot on the calendar. Gretchen Rubin from “The Happiness Project” talks about how unfinished projects make her UNhappy so she picks one and works on it for 15 minutes every morning until it is done. Just pick a time and stick to it.
Pick up the pictures and dump them one by one.
When you get them all sorted by year—and I’m not here yet—but when you do THEN figure out how you want to keep them. I have already decided that I am going to make albums by year–thrown in willy nilly but contained by year. The pictures that don’t make the album are either getting tossed (if they are bad) or I’m going to store them in picture boxes labelled by year. If I get crazy maybe the pictures will get further sorted by month–but that’s a long shot. I’ve had no time to deal with this for 6+ years–I don’t want to get so complicated that I can’t complete it and it remains unfinished forever.
In the future, once I get this organized, I’m going to keep a standing photo box labelled by year with dividers in it by month. If the picture makes it to the printer then it immediately will get “filed” in the box. Then there is a method. Later if I want to do something with them, great, but if not at least it is orderly. And most importantly, my sons, later on, will be able to ask me what they looked like when they were 6 and 8 and I can say look in the photo box labelled 2013–September.
Thanks Steph and Renee:)
by Jen | Sep 12, 2013 | Interior Decorating, Organizing
This is going to be one of the most riveting posts you will have ever read. It is about how to hide electrical cords. Yes.
Amy Volk over at Amyvolk.com showed us how to Organize Cords on her September 9th blog posting. I’m going to piggy back on hers–make sure to read it–and add an aesthetic version. Amy, my lovely friend who is very wise, makes my job easy. I can’t make your house look good if it is a disorganized mess. She will clear your chaotic piles and cure your where-are-my-car keys-woes.
She is your glue, and I am your glitter. Yes.
Cords are ugly. Functional but ugly. Hide them. Buy Command Cord Clips. They come in small, medium, and large. I bought the large on Amazon for the first project.
This is a cable cord that will not lay flat. It drives me crazy.
You are suppose to press the 3M removable tape for 30 seconds, then add the hooks and hold that onto the tape for 30 seconds. AND then wait an hour until you use it. I didn’t wait. So it took more time than it should have trying to “fix” it. If you are using these for heavy cords like I was I would follow the directions.
This is the after. The cord needs some time before it is ready to lay flat.
This is a much better after. It is an average lamp cord and I used the small clips. You can’t see it at all.
I know you need to catch your breath after all this excitement. Laugh all you want but when your friends and family ooohhh and ahhh remember your pals Glue and Glitter.
by Jen | Sep 3, 2013 | Organizing
This makes me laugh, albeit slightly frenzied and franticly, but laugh nonetheless. When we moved we added up that our total household goods weighed just under 20,000 pounds. Now granted that does include tables, couches, grills, lawn equipment, beds, clothes, toys, etc… and we are a family of four, but still. The UK bus puts it into perspective. AND it all had to be UNPACKED.
UNPACKED.
We won’t talk about packing. I can’t. Not yet. It’s too fresh.
But unpacking. It all has to go somewhere, and the floor is not an option. Staying in the boxes doesn’t work. Sure the packers labelled the box “Garage”…and surely what was packed from the garage can’t be that crucial, until you open the box and realize there is only ONE thing in it from the actual garage and the remainder of it consists of your couch cushions from the living room. It’s all such a mess. Don’t even get me started on the toilet brush, plunger, and my children’s toothbrushes that were all packed together, as in touching, in a box labelled Master Bedroom. (I have to do this again in 10 more months.)
Remember the Nike ad…Just Do It? Purge it. Just do it. I know there are books and tv shows and people out there dedicated to this tricky business of helping people deal with their stuff. Let me just oversimplify the whole process.
Purge it.
Put like things together….everywhere. Go ahead, make a mess.
Purge again.
Then put the like items back in ONE place that makes sense. If you can’t fit them all into the space on the first try—You need to purge again. I know this sounds like a “Duh” statement but this is where I got into trouble. I am the master at utilizing vertical space. I fill empty space with shelves and then add those portable wire helper shelves. I swap containers for different shapes and sizes so they are more conducive to fitting into the puzzle I am putting together. I can pack a car like nobody’s business too. But here’s the thing, when it’s time to pull all those things out it is like disentangling 20 large clowns out of a Volkswagon beetle. So at the end of the day I was left staring at a whole lot of clowns disguised as one too many small appliances.
This post is not titled “How to Fill Small Spaces”–it’s a cautionary tale. It’s a story about how I was delusional about how much stuff we really had.
The only thing that saved me is the following. Before my shipment of stuff arrived from the moving company I went through every cupboard, closet, drawer and thought ahead to every storage item I owned to assign where all the “stuff” was going to go.
Linens. Crafts. Extra Batteries. Mop. Vacuum. Mixing Bowls. China. Books. Office Supplies. Shoes. Coats. Keys. Photo Albums. Christmas Decorations. Extra Toiletries. Seasonal Clothes. Toys. Wrapping Paper. Phone Book/Local Numbers/Local Area Things To Do.
Notice not one category includes decorative items—because who cares at this point. That’s the icing on the cake and first we need to make the cake.
I used post it notes and had a master list of every room with what “nuts and bolts” were going to go into it. AND this time when I unpacked and the the mugs didn’t fit into their designated space I purged AGAIN instead of getting another helper shelf and performing a circus act to make them fit.
We are moving again. This time maybe with a single level UK bus vs a double decker.
by Jen | May 3, 2013 | Interior Decorating, Organizing, Popular
Pottery Barn
This is a tough one. I struggle with this too. How do you make built ins, shelves, bookcases look artfully arranged without looking “arranged”. It’s like that scenario where you spend 4 hours trying to look really good and when you arrive at said destination– “Oh this old thing? I just threw it on.” It’s the unwritten rule that unless it is for a grade, interview, etc…no one wants to look like they tried too hard.
So when I look at magazine pictures of bookshelves they all look so amazing and haphazard all at once.
Like this:
Pottery Barn
But really? Who has bins of…are those parchments?…lying around and books that all happen to match?
Hence the title of this post—How to Style a Bookshelf for Normal People.
You need to remember a few rules. Let’s keep it basic. Simple. When we have it mastered we will move on to “How to Style a Bookshelf for Extraordinay People Who Happen to Own Books that All Match…or Bins of Parchments”.
Rules:
This is Bookshelves 101. This is not 201, 301, or even the dreaded 501.
- First take a before picture of the situation.
- Then ask yourself do you like everything IN the bookshelf? If you do not remove those items.
- Is there a reoccurring element? Lots of picture frames? Baskets? Vases? A collection of…clay dinosaurs that your kids made? What else is similar? Do you like having this in the bookshelf? Do you WANT to look at it?
- This is the key: THERE MUST BE A THEME. That’s the secret.
Examples:
Books and Black Photo Boxes (multiple) and Pictures in Silver Frames.
Books and Square Baskets (multiple) and collection of Solid Color Ceramic Vases.
Books and Something Matching and Something Similar.
Books and Vases and Urns in similar colors (white, cream, blue).
Books and Small Framed Kids Artwork (multiple) and Wooden Boxes.
Books and Category and Category
- Now take everything out of bookshelves and group items into your 3 categories.
- BIG HINT: COLOR IS THE GREAT EQUALIZER.
Books and BLACK boxes and consistent SILVER picture frames.
Books and Matching Color and Something with Similar Colors (Pick 2 or 3 TOPS)
NOW Look at these Pictures:
Theme is Cream and White with Vessels. Only colors are Cream/Brown, White, Grey/Blue and a little Black.
Can you figure out the Theme?
These are JUST Books. That is the Theme. Every shelf is full and about the same height. Visual Consistency.
I think you got this.
- Now with whatever you have culled into THREE CATEGORIES of items you like and WANT to see…start putting things in.
Build each shelf the same height as the one above/next to/below. Again look at the pictures.
If you are having trouble–stick it in the best you can and take another picture and compare. Any better?
It’s a start. THINK ABOUT HOW YOU CAN IMPROVE THIS. Can you spray paint all the picture frames so they match? Can you go to the store and buy matching….black boxes? Can you take off the book jackets? Can you arrange the books by color? Do you need more books for this to work?
Make a list. Buy the spray paint. Look for orange whatevers. Pick something new if you don’t have any reoccurring anything…Globes, parchments..?
Part 2 Coming Next…Help with Arranging or 201.
