The other reason I haven’t been around much is that the pollen count where I live is incredibly high. We had a wet winter here in CA. It’s still raining even though it’s late May; usually the rain knocks off in March or April, giving me two precious months of sunlight before the fog rolls in in June. Not so this year. As if the gloom weren’t bad enough for my energy levels, the rain is contributing to record levels of pollen.

I’m one of those people who is allergic to everything. Animals, dust, mold, grass, weeds, and trees of every description. At the moment, the trees that are kicking my ass are the non-fruiting olive trees that the City planted on the sidewalk. For some reason, olive trees tend to trigger asthma and eye-itching symptoms before congestion and runny nose (but don’t worry! I’m still getting that crap from other trees, so I’m not deprived), and there’s nothing more draining than chronic low-grade asthma.

The reason why I’m bitching about this on a blog about ADD and organizing is that it reminds me why I do this in the first place. You see, I used to feel like this all the time. I actually used to feel worse, because in addition to the asthma kicking my ass, I got several inner ear infections a year because of my allergies. I struggled to wake up in the morning and often needed naps in the afternoon. I was tired, dizzy, disoriented, and completely unable to live my life.

Getting organized ultimately changed that. Once I ditched my clutter, I had less stuff around to collect dust. Once I organized what I owned, I could contain put it in containers, and then it was easier to keep clean. Once my space was organized, I could organize my time, and set aside parts of my day to maintain my home. It happened slowly, but soon I began to breathe a little easier. Then I noticed I had more energy. After awhile, I was able to get up without hitting the snooze button several times; and then, I found I could sometimes wake up on my own. As my energy increased, so did my ability to focus. I began to take some control over my moods and my ADHD symptoms, finally getting to the point where I am actually stable. It’s a reality I never could have imagined even three short years ago.

Today is like a visit from my old life. I slept for about ten hours last night and still had to drag myself out of bed this morning. I feel dizzy and spaced out and I can’t catch my breath. I need to summon the energy to vacuum with my trusty HEPA vac, because I know I will feel better once I do, but it’s an immense struggle even to think about it.

It totally sucks.  On the other hand, there is a silver lining; as miserable as I feel right now, it’s an affirmation of the immense positive changes I have been able to make.  It’s also a reminder of why I keep this blog .  If someone like me — someone with attention deficit disorder, depression, asthma, allergies, and chronic ear infections — could overcome these barriers to getting organized and taking control of my life, so can anyone.  Start small, have faith in yourself, and big changes will be the result.

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.

“This area is working because you care about your cats”, Jana said. “Well, yeah,” I said. “It’s easier to take care of them than it is to take care of myself.” Jana assured me that if I could create such an organized cat zone, I could replicate that in other parts of my home.

As for the rest of the kitchen, there were all types of problems. I didn’t have any permanent place to do art, so I tended to take over the kitchen table, which meant my husband and I couldn’t use it to eat. The pantry area, and likewise the microwave, are far away from the food prep area. The cupboards in the food prep area were full to bursting, and the counter tops were cluttered. I also stored the portable dishwasher next to the sink because that’s where I used it, and for some reason I felt like I couldn’t move it back and forth to a better location.

I didn’t take pictures at the time, but below is an image I took today. It doesn’t compare to how bad the situation was when I started, but the space is cluttered because I was in the middle of cooking dinner, and the dishwasher is clearly in the way. It gives you an idea of what we were dealing with.

There's not much space between that dishwasher and the washer-dryer (which would be just beyond the edge of the right side of the image).

My clutter buddy pointed out two things in the Food Prep Zone areas that were functioning pretty well. The knife block, mounted above the stove, freed up a lot of drawer space (though the drawers were still overflowing). I had also installed a spice rack on the door to the water heater so that my spices were always at hand when I was cooking.

This wall-mount magnetic knife block was one of the best things I've ever bought. It was less than $5 from Ikea.

This spice rack was also from Ikea. There are two, and I think each of them went for $9.99.

The other zones were pretty problematic. As I’ve already mentioned, my artwork tended to take over the kitchen table, keeping us from eating there, and the pantry area was far away from the food prep area, meaning that I had to run back and forth between the two whenever I cooked anything.

We decided to begin out project with the Food Prep Zone. It’s a small area with a galley-type layout, and it’s about 4 feet by ten feet. It’s used every day, so the returns on our work would be immediate. Organizing the food prep area would take only an afternoon, and it would be easy to maintain throughout the following week.

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?

When I left off, I had read Julie Morgenstern’s book “Organizing From the Inside Out”.  In spite of my initial skepticism, I finished her book having learned something very, very important: I wasn’t as disorganized as I thought. In contrast to every other book and article I’d ever read, Morgenstern’s “Inside Out” philosophy begins with what’s already working.

It took awhile for that to sink in.  What’s already working?  In my life?  In my home?  Please.  Try “nothing”.

But, having read that question, I could not unread it.  The thought stayed with me, and after a while, I realized that I did not, in fact “always lose everything”.  For instance, I rarely misplaced my keys and never misplaced my wallet because they always got put back in the same place.

I also realized that in spite of being extremely cluttered, I could usually, eventually, find what I was looking for.  Yes, it’s true, everything I owned was stacked up in piles all over my house.  Why? Was it because I’m a horrible, careless, hopelessly disorganized person like my fourth grade teacher said I was?  No.  My stuff was out in the open because that’s where I could see it. Like a lot of others with ADD, I’m an “out of sight, out of mind” type of person.

Did I spend more time than I liked looking for my stuff?  Yes.  Was my clutter driving me up a wall?  Absolutely.  Was the chronically disorganized state of my house exacerbating my asthma and allergy problems?  Definitely.  But it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Thank the gods for that, because it looked terrible; but it looked terrible because it was actually borderline functional.

Suddenly, this transformed my problem from “I’ve always been a horrible disorganized mess and I can never change” to “I’m a visual person who needs to declutter, and then implement solutions that allow me to contain my stuff where I can see it”.  Compare those two thoughts.  Which task sounds more manageable?  Which person would you rather be?

I slowly put down my book and went to my computer.  I e-mailed Jana: “I don’t want to get your hopes up … and I especially don’t want to get MY hopes up … but I think, just maybe, I can do this.”

Well, my perfectionism was not in vain, because I won the contest!  Yay!  You can check out my lens here.