Well-Ordered Chaos » organizing

Another Step Toward an Organized Entryway

Addy — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:31:51 +0000

Remember back in November, when I organized my entryway? Remember when I promised myself and you, my dear readers, that I was giving myself two weeks to sell some of my crap on Craigslist? And remember how I broke that promise, betraying your trust in me, as well as my own integrity? Could I get any more dramatic about this? Let’s see … I could commit ritual suicide with a dirty fork, like in that Monty Python sketch …

Anyway, I finally spent a tedious couple of hours yesterday afternoon writing up an ad for my bike and its accessories, and a few of the other things I was supposed to sell. I checked — last fall I gave myself a due date of November 20th. It’s not for nothing I have ADHD … Two weeks is kind of like four months, right?

My Organizing Journey: Getting Started — The Staging Area and the Big Sort

Addy — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:16:48 +0000

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.

My Organizing Journey: Getting Started — What’s Working? What’s Not?

Addy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:31:39 +0000

After identifying Activity Zones, my clutter buddy and I talked about what was functioning well in each area, and what needed to be fixed. I was overwhelmed by the mess, and initially felt that nothing at all, anywhere in my kitchen, was working. Jana pointed out that the Cat Zone was not only functional, but it looked reasonably nice too:

: The floor mat contains their water dish and food dishes; the big rubbermaid bin has food in it; and the small box on the shelf above has things like grooming supplies and cat treats.

“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.

My Organizing Journey: Getting Started — Identifying Activity Zones

Addy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:15:27 +0000

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?

My Organizing Journey, Step 2: It’s Better Than You Think

Addy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:35:16 +0000

Last week I started writing up my organizing journey from it’s very beginnings in the fall of 2004. Since the continuation of my entryway project now rests on things beyond my control (like somebody buying my bike and my clothes), I’ve decided to spend a few posts continuing that story. Today’s post isn’t about taking physical action. You can do it all in your head while sitting on the couch. It’s nonetheless a crucially important part of my process and I never would have gotten off the ground without it.

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.”

How to Organize and Entryway, Step 6: Maintenance

Addy — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:04:49 +0000

When I went to containerize my entryway last week, I noticed that things had slipped a bit. To the right of the front door, there was packing paper spilling out of the recycling bin, and my bike was still in the back corner because I hadn’t gotten around to selling it yet:

Entryway Maintenance is slipping a bit

To the left of the front door, there was a huge pile of cardboard on the floor from various mail orders. This is an ongoing problem with our entryway. We get a fair number of deliveries, and we never get around to breaking down the boxes and recycling them. Recycling gets taken out once a week, and since we usually forget to deal with it until the last minute, we inevitably forget to deal with the boxes. They can pile up for months, tucked in the corner where they soon become invisible.

Cardboard Fail

I got two containers to try as day pack solutions last week. The wider, shallower of the two was perfect for the packs. Since I still had the other one, I decided to try it as a “home” for cardboard boxes to be recycled. When we get a package, the box is broken down immediately and put in its new “home”.

So far, I’ve been pretty good about this; but M has been out of town since we implemented this system. He gets back tonight. We’ll see how it holds up with both of us here.

The ADD hiker: an organized hike is a safe hike

Addy — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:45:51 +0000

A lot of people with ADHD find that they love being outside. Personally, I feel like my ADD vanishes the minute I leave civilization. I’m usually the first one to spot wildlife, catch birdsong, or to notice a change in the weather. Maybe there’s something to that whole Hunter/Farmer thing.

However, heading outside can be also be intimidating if you have ADD. We forget things a lot, and when we’re packing to go out into the wilderness, that can be a scary prospect. If you’re traveling to Paris and you forget your water bottle, you can buy another one. If you’re traveling the John Muir Trail and you forget your water bottle, you might be toast.

Well, my buddy Deb Lauman, aka Ramkitten, has just the thing for you.

Ramkitten befriended me when I was brand-new to the communities over at Squidoo.com and Tagfoot.com. It turned out she’s an avid hiker (as serious as I would like to be, but am not) and had recently visited my favorite place on earth, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. She’s also a Search And Rescue volunteer.

Her SAR work made her realize how many rescue situations could be prevented if people set out with the proper equipment. This led her to invent the 24-Hour Pack. It’s a day pack that comes pre-packed with all the supplies to get you through a night in the wilderness if you find yourself unexpectedly stranded.

The keyword there is “unexpected”. Nobody Ramkitten has ever rescued expected to be lost, hypothermic, dehydrated — or, in the most tragic cases, dead. Fortunately, many of her missions end happily. Deb blogs here about why she never feels silly carrying her 24-Hour Pack, even when she’s only expecting to be gone for a 20 minute walk.

I’ve got to admit, I’m not always as cautious as I should be, and I know better. I’m an experienced backwoods canoe camper. I’ve been a wilderness guide and a Girl Scout leader. But I still take chances I shouldn’t. Let’s be real; I have ADD. I’m impulsive. When I’m outside, I hate to sit still … which means I’m constantly fighting the inclination to head out farther and in worse weather than I really should.

Ramkitten’s writing has gotten me thinking deeply about the precautions I need to take next time I head out on a hike, even if it’s just up crowded Mt. Tam. If you’re an ADHD hiker you should check out the following:

Hikers: Common Mistakes to Avoid If you think you know everything about hiking, you don’t.

The 24 Hour Pack: Hike Smart, Be Prepared, Be Safe If you’ve already got a day pack or three, read this article about what to put in it to make your own 24 Hour Pack.

The PRE-Pack: A Pre-Equipped Day Pack for Hikers New to hiking? Lost your gear in a flash flood? Let Deb do the work for you. And remember to read Common Mistakes To Avoid before you head out!

How to Organize an Entryway, Step 5: Containerizing

Addy — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:12:57 +0000

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!!!

The perfect is the enemy of my enemy is my … wait, what?

Addy — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:19:22 +0000

This weekend I wrote a Squidoo lens about tabby cats.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category. I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been about my various cognitive issues, and some of them have been pretty heavy. I chose “tabby cats” as my topic for two reasons: one, I have two tabby cats; and number two, I am such a nerd that I have actually phenotyped my cats.

That’s right, I was reading about cat genetics several years ago on the internet, and armed with the information I found about dominant and recessive alleles, I figured out which genes both of my cats express. I did this for fun.

Anyway, I figured that I’d be able to write this lens in my sleep. But then I decided that I wanted to illustrate the lens with photos of my actual cats. So I had to take pictures of them, and then download them, and then crop them, and then upload them, and then write blurbs about what they illustrated …

And in short, the lens took me twenty #%*@ing hours. Gah. Actually, a lot of my lenses, and my blog entries, and anything else I write, tends to take me way longer than I feel it should. You may have noticed that I can’t write a blog entry without writing an essay.

I know I’d be more productive if I could let it go sometimes. One of my MFA profs liked to tell a story about a pottery class in which half the students were told that they’d be graded on the quality of one perfect pot, so they spent the entire term on that one pot. The other half of the class was told they’d be graded on the number of pots they produced; the quality of the pieces didn’t matter. Those students spent the term madly making pots, as many as they could.

Guess which group produced the best ceramics?

If you know anything about the creative process, you won’t be surprised to learn that it was the second group. They felt free to experiment and make mistakes, because the only thing that mattered was that they made as many pots as they could. They felt free, and it showed in their work.

What does this have to do with ADD and organization? Well, I’ve been reading a lot about time management lately, and it turns out that perfectionism is a common ADD trait. It’s also a huge drain on productivity. It certainly tell you that it messes with my life. I don’t update my blogs as often as I would like, because I feel like I have to say something profound, and I feel obligated to add graphics (that takes quite a bit of time, actually).

So I am hereby resolving to write my blog posts without worrying how “good” they are. It’s a blog, dammit, not a New Yorker article or a PhD thesis. Some posts will be extensive and detailed. Others, well, they’ll just be blog posts.

Entryway continues

Addy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:28:02 +0000

Today I’m picking up some of my containers from The Container Store on the way back from my med check. I’m on a low dose at the moment, thanks to the asshats who broke into my car last week, destroying the ignition, and forcing me to deal with that emergency instead of making my doctor’s appointment. The joy of stimulants is that they’re controlled substances, so you can’t just get refills.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to containerizing some of my closet chaos. I’ll be sure to take photos, and later in the week I’ll write up the process.

In the mean time, why not take a productivity break and check out Cake Wrecks? Pictures of professionally decorated cakes, gone terribly, horribly wrong.