The big day had arrived. My clutter buddy was at my home and by the end of that day I would, come hell or high water, have made some progress on organizing my home. My confidence had received a boost from learning that my apparently chaotic surroundings were actually a somewhat functional attempt to be organized, but I was nonetheless apprehensive. I had put so much work into organizing schemes and solutions over the years, and none of them had stuck. Could this attempt really be any different?
Fortunately, I had someone there to talk me down, in the form of my clutter buddy Jana. We had decided to start with part of my kitchen; since I used it every day, it would be easier to maintain, and the returns on our efforts would be immediate.
Having read about the “zone” system of organizing from Organizing From the Inside Out, we went through my kitchen and determined that there were several activity zones. Julie Morgenstern is a huge advocate of what she calls “the kindergarten classroom model” of organizing. A kindergarten classroom is broken up into activity areas: there’s a reading area, a dress-up area, an arts-and-crafts area, etc. The supplies used in each activity are stored in their “zone”, making clean-up easy and sometimes even fun.
In my kitchen, there were several zones, some of them overlapping.
- The food preparation area; this was the area with the sink, the stove top and oven, and some storage cupboards.
- The storage and pantry area, unfortunately located across the room from the food prep zone.
- The laundry area is pretty much on top of the food prep zone, since the washer-dryer is a stacking unit that
- The eating area, with the kitchen table and chairs, was adjacent to the microwave and the pantry zone.
- The admin area was a built-in light table on one of the kitchen walls (the owners of the home are filmmakers) that we were using to store mailing supplies and notepads for taking phone messages.
- Finally, there was the cat zone, where the cats’ water dish, food dishes, food, and grooming supplies were stored.
Click here to go to Part 2 of Getting Started: What’s Working? What’s Not?