Having sorted my stuff, it’s time to assign homes to my stuff. The dress clothes and the jackets already have homes on the coat hooks and in the closet. That leaves me three more categories to store. The first one is cold weather accessories:
Hats, gloves, scarves, an extra fleece vest, and a cat.
These are items that we need to keep, but don’t use all that often. We need to get at them when we go camping, and when we travel to climates where they have winter. Their home needs to be a place where we can get at them when we need them, but if we have to sacrifice ease of access to something we use more often, we can certainly do so.
The second category of items that need a home is our outdoor sports equipment. This consists of some hiking poles and a few backpacks. We use these much more often than the cold weather gear, so we need to be able to get at it; but backpacks, a life vest, and a canoe paddle are much more bulky than gloves and hats.
Life jackets are bulky for a reason.
Since I don’t go paddling as often as I would like, I put the canoe paddle in a corner of the closet. The life jacket I just put on a hanger in the closet. The backpacks are trickier. They’re as bulky as the life vest, but I use them more often, and they don’t stay on hangers very well. For now, they can live on the floor of the closet.
The third category is hats. My husband and I both wear hats, and not all of them are the easy-going floppy kind that can be tossed just anywhere. Some of them are nice enough that they should be stored flat and protected from sunlight and moths. If we’re actually going to wear them, we need to store them where we can see them — so they can’t stay in the closet.
In order to take any further action, I need to containerize. In my next post I’ll talk about how I choose containers and solutions for my entryway project.