There’s a lot of wisdom in the old adage “A Place for Everything and Everything In Its Place”. However, if your space hasn’t been organized before, most of what you own does not yet have its own “place”. This is why it’s important to set aside a portion of your home as a staging area. Ideally, this is a space that’s a little inconvenient to get to (so you’re not tempted to dump anything and everything there) but also big enough to contain all of the items you come across that don’t belong in the space you’re organizing, but that don’t yet have a “home”. We chose a part of the bedroom that isn’t in the way of foot traffic. Since we had to climb a spiral staircase to get there, we wouldn’t be tempted to use it as a repository for anything we were too lazy to put away.
What happens if you choose an area that’s in the general flow of traffic? So glad you asked. When I reorganized my art studio last Spring, I used the kitchen table as my staging area. At first, it just had a few things on it. Now it looks like this:
The flowers sure add class! And yes, that is a sock.
Anyway.
When we started organizing my food prep area, we knew that there would be four major categories. The first category was anything that didn’t belong in the kitchen, period. The second was any item that definitely belonged in the food prep area. The third category was for items that belonged in the kitchen, but not in the food prep area. The fourth was for those duplicate or unnecessary items that could be donated to charity. was for anything that was too trashed to be worth keeping. Finally, the was for anything that was too trashed to be worth keeping.
The food prep area consists of the following:
- a counter
- an oven/stove top
- two storage cupboards
- two drawers
- a sink, and an under-sink cupboard
Adjacent to the food prep area are additional storage areas and appliances. There are:
- a dishwasher
- the water-heater closet
- a tiny alcove with glass shelves
There’s also another tiny alcove with the following:
- a tiny counter
- a lower cabinet
- a drawer
- an upper cabinet
The dishwasher is in the way, and there's not a lot of space to move around it.
I initially had a huge mental block about the dishwasher. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I felt like I had to keep it in front of the sink; I used it in front of the sink, and the only place where it was really out of the way was the water heater closet. My friend pointed out that the darn thing is on wheels and it’s not that hard to move. Besides, I didn’t need to get into the water heater closet that often — and when I did, moving the dishwasher out of the way was not a big deal. So we took everything out of the water-heater closet (except the water heater, of course) and duly moved the dishwasher to its new home. It made a huge improvement.
Having moved the dishwasher to a more sensible location, we emptied out all of the cabinets and all of the shelves. We took everything out from under the sink. We took everything out of the drawers. We took everything off the counters. Then we stared for at it for awhile in order to figure out what we had.