It's a work table with work on it, even.

This is exactly the kind of work I need to be able to do on this table.  I have [...]]]> Well, I did it.  After a year of allowing my kitchen table to become submerged under an ever-growing pile of random clutter, I finally reclaimed it:

It's a work table with work on it, even.

This is exactly the kind of work I need to be able to do on this table.  I have a large piece of handmade paper with flowers pressed into it, but it’s so delicate that the flowers are in constant danger of coming off.  I need to put down a layer of medium to make sure they stay put.

Here’s what the table looked like when I began:

Kitchen Table, Before

I started by separating everything into piles on the floor according to my categories. I discovered that I had five categories: art supplies, medications and first aid, cooking utensils, stuff to go upstairs, and papers to be filed. Since the rest of my home is pretty organized, dealing with these categories was pretty straightfoward — art supplies were put away in the studio area, first aid stuff in the medicine cabinet, and cooking utensils in the kitchen drawers.

The “upstairs” stuff had been the pebble that started the landslide, way back last Spring. I have a bunch of knick-knacks and stuff that I have no place to display, so I’m keeping them in a closet upstairs for now. For whatever reason, when I reorganized my studio last Spring, I didn’t ever get around to putting them away. As a result, the table started attracting random crap, and the situation snowballed.

This is an object lesson for a treacherous part of the organizing process. You see, by the time you’re about 90% done with your organizing project, you will stop, and you will take a look at what’s left to do. You will think to yourself, “I’m almost done. I’m tired, and I’m bored, and I’ll just finish this tomorrow.”

Well, don’t, because you won’t. You’ll forget about it, and pretty soon your chaos will be like you never tried to tame it. So learn from my sorry tale, kids, finish the job the first time.

Yesterday I started the fifth step of organizing the entryway: Containerizing. Earlier in the week I went to The Container Store to get supplies. I got two clear acrylic sweater drawers, a set of matching clear dividers, and two plastic bins to try out [...]]]> Welcome back to the series, “How to Organize an Entryway”.

Yesterday I started the fifth step of organizing the entryway: Containerizing. Earlier in the week I went to The Container Store to get supplies. I got two clear acrylic sweater drawers, a set of matching clear dividers, and two plastic bins to try out as backpack storage.

Here’s the closet before containerizing:

The Closet, Before Containers

The cold-weather hats, gloves, and scarves, are in a leaning stack, threatening to topple out of their stop-gap container. The backpacks are in a pile on the floor of the closet. Some of the everyday hats are in boxes, but the others are stacked on top.

The cold-weather accessories have a home, but it’s not a good one; the backpacks don’t really have a home at all.
I know from personal experience that if this continues, the piles will eventually metastasize and merge. Pretty soon we’ll be back where we started — with a big pile of vests, gloves, backpacks, and hats on the floor of the closet.

Clockwise from top right: scarves and gaiters, hats, gloves and liners, ear-warmers

I put the spare vests in one of the sweater drawers. Next, I put the drawer dividers in the other sweater drawer, and used it for cold weather accessories. Gloves and gaiters have a space, hats have a space, gloves and liners have a space, and my ear warmers have a space.

My next task was to solve my backpack problem. We have three day packs in different sizes as well as a fanny pack. Depending on where we’re going and how long we’re going to be out, we might need to take a different pack — the large internal frame packs for rugged hikes or short overnight trips, or the small ultralight day pack and the fanny pack if it’s short hike and we’re just carrying water.

The back packs have never had a home assigned to them before. They wind up in whatever closet is most convenient, stuff gets piled on top of them, and then we need to use them we have to do a mad search. I decided that the ideal way to handle this was to find a way for them to stand up on end in the entryway closet, almost like vertical files. But how would I do this?

Since I was at a loss, I took up the first offer of help extended to me by a friendly Container Store employee. I described the problem to her. She thought for a minute, and then her eyes lit up. “I’ve got it!” she said. “Come with me.”

I followed her to a corner of the store I’d never noticed before. “This is all stuff that’s on clearance, either because it’s been discontinued or damaged out. A lot of what winds up here are bins that don’t have lids. If you stand your packs up on end, the container will keep them from falling over, but you don’t need a lid — so why pay for a lid?”

SCORE! I found two possible candidates, both at 70% discounts. I decided to take them home and try them both. I could either return the one I didn’t need, or use it to solve another organizing problem.

The smaller of the two containers turned out to be perfect for the back packs. They all fit, standing up on end, and they’re clearly visible, allowing us to grab a pack and go. What’s more, the day packs now have an obvious, official home assigned to them, making it easier to put them away after hiking.

Containerized closet! Everything is visible, accessible, and easy to put away.

So there you have it. A neatly containerized closet. So my entryway is done, right?

Well, no.

Remember, I still have some used clothes to mend, alter and sell. I also promised myself I’d sell the old bike I never ride. And then there are the casual hats, living unsustainably in bins in the corner of the closet … oh yeah, and there’s the cat box, still in front of the door, which I need to move to the side. In order for my entryway to be “done”, it needs to be functioning more or less the way I want it to. Here’s what I need to do to make that happen:

1) Sell or donate bike, accessories, and skis
2) Sell or donate used clothing
3) Alter clothes that need to be hemmed or taken in
4) Solve hat storage problem — wall mount hat cubbies, perhaps?
5) Move cat box to the left of the door
6) Get shoji screen to put in front of cat box
7) Consider whether the entryway needs a “mission control” area — a place for bags, keys, library books, outgoing mail?

I’m giving myself a deadline of November 20th to deal with the sale/donation items and the alteration/mending items. If I haven’t listed the items by then, I’m calling up the VVA and arranging a donation. As long as I’m setting deadlines, wouldn’t it be nice if I could have company over the Thanksgiving holiday, and not have them greeted by the cats’ litter box as they walk in the door? I think I’ll set the goal of fixing the cats’ litter area by Thanksgiving weekend. As for the hat storage, I’ll keep looking for a solution, and hopefully I’ll find one by the end of the month.

Will Addy reach her goals? Will she sell her used stuff like she’s been meaning to, and make a few extra bucks, or will she slack off donate it to the VVA? Will her cats’ litter box we greeting her guests until the end of time? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR THE CONTINUING SAGA OF … THE ENTRY WAY!!!

For example, [...]]]> Last week I wrote about making up a gmail calendar schedule, but as you’ve probably already learned, it isn’t enough to just get yourself a gmail account and open up the calendar feature.  You have to create a schedule, and then you have to notate it in a way that makes sense to you.

For example, here is my gmail calendar:

My gmail calendar

At the beginning of the summer, I realized that in spite of all the work I’d put into organizing my space, it was getting cluttered and dirty because I wasn’t maintaining it. There are some people in this world who will notice that their space is spawning giant dust bunnies, realize they need to clean, and make time to do it.

I am not one of these people.

I realized that I’d been using my gmail calendar for awhile, and I liked a lot of things about it — it gave me my schedule in nice blocks of color, and I had a number of options to set up reminders of appointments. So why not create a few blocks of time on my schedule called and errands things like that?

Here’s the google document version of the schedule:

Nice and vague.

On the first day that I got a chore reminder, I stood in the kitchen and went, “uhhhhhmmm …”. I knew I was supposed to be doing chores or errands or tasks or … something. I’d gotten a text message that said so. But what was I actually supposed to DO?

After staring at the wall for awhile, I got distracted and wandered away.

I was working with an ADD coach at the time, so at my next meeting with her we talked about my schedule. I told her that I felt overwhelmed by housework when confronted with a vague schedule segment called “chores, errands and tasks”. I knew there was stuff needing to be done, but I was damned if I knew what it was.  I honestly don’t know what people do when they clean.

My coach helped me to make a list of housework that needed to be done on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, and a quarterly basis:

A bit more specific

We eliminated “errands” from that part of the schedule, because they varied too much to fit neatly into one hour chunks. Then I went home and decided what chores to do on what days:

Monday: vacuum kitchen area, mop food prep area, clean microwave

Tuesday: vacuum main room, clean bathroom, put away clean laundry

Friday: vacuum bedroom, wash bedsheets, put away clean laundry

My Monday chore calendar block looks like this:

Monday Blues

I get that text in my SMS reminder, my pop-up reminder, and my e-mail reminder if I chose to have one. Now, instead of getting a text that tells me to do “chores”, which sends my brain off into outer space, I get a text that tells me exactly which chores to do.