I stared work on my entryway today. I’ll be posting a series of entries on how I’m going about it, step by step, so you can see how a Real Live Person with ADD starts and finishes an organizing project.
I basically use Julie Morgenstern’s five-step SPACE system (“SPACE” stands for Sort, Purge, Assign a home, Containerize, Equalize).If you’ve never organized a space before, it can be hard to know exactly where to start, so I’m spelling it everything I do to the last detail.
To begin with, here is my entryway:
My Entryway
And here it is from another angle.
Nice, isn't it?
It’s a pretty hellish mess. There are suitcases from a trip I took in September, a grocery bag filled with gods-know-what, and stuff spilling out of the closet.
The sad thing is that I organized the entryway in May. I found paperwork dating from 2006, but I cleaned it all out. So why didn’t it stick?
My mistake was that I didn’t finish the job. I neglected to sort and purge anything in the coat closet. To make matters worse, I moved an unwanted bookcase into the entryway, and used it as a staging ground to sell some used books. I failed to put a deadline on that task, so I never finished the job — and six months later, half the books are still in my entryway, taking up valuable real estate. There’s also a pile of donations that I never donated, and also some just plain trash:
Hey, that's some very important cardboard!
Before I start organizing a space, I do some “pre-organizing”. That is, I take a thorough look at the space. I ask myself the following questions: how do I use this space? how would I like to use this space? what’s keeping me from using it in the way that I like? what’s working about the space as it is? what’s not working?
To answer my own questions, I currently use my entryway as a dumping ground. Bags, briefcases, and backpacks tend to get dumped on the floor when my husband or I walk in the door. Because it’s closed off from the living area, the entryway also houses the litter box; and since the mail comes through a slot in the door every day, it also has a recycling bin for junk mail.
I would like my entryway to be a place where I can store coats, hats, and shoes, and find them when I need them. I would also like it to be more welcoming to guests.
What’s working about the space is a shoe rack where our shoes can usually be found, and a rack of coat pegs mounted to one wall. What’s not working about the space is the bookcase, which blocks a second rack of coat pegs, significantly cutting down on storage; the closet, which is vomiting forth its contents like a hungover college freshling; the coat tree, which is also overflowing; we have no good place to store hats or cold weather accessories; and the fact that the cat box is the first thing guests see when they enter my home.
Having taken stock of my entryway, I am ready to proceed to the next step: pre-sorting, which I will cover in a new post.
Hmmm, maybe this why my friends never come over …
The charming view, upon entering my humble abode.
[...] Step Toward an Organized Entryway Remember back in November, when I organized my entryway? Remember when I promised myself and you, my dear readers, that I was giving myself two weeks to [...]