Organizing – Page 3 – Lisa Holcomb

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Parenting

January Projects

As you know, I go crazy in January and start cleaning and organizing everything in sight. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the cold, rainy weather.

Yesterday I tackled my hallway bathroom closet, which I guess could also be called my linen closet.

Before:

Okay, so it doesn't look quite so bad as my brain says it does, but it was making me crazy. — Okay, so it doesn’t look quite so bad as my brain says it does, but it was making me crazy.

During:

There's a method to the madness. One box is labeled "Another Room," one is "Keep," one is "Donate," and one is "Toss." The "Keep" box is the giant pile in the middle. — There’s a method to the madness. One box is labeled “Another Room,” one is “Keep,” one is “Donate,” and one is “Toss.” The “Keep” box is the giant pile in the middle.

After several hours and possibly a billion interruptions (Next time I’m putting a Do Not Enter if You Value Your Life sign up.):

Done! I filled one of each other above labeled boxes (except "Keep" which was the stuff that went back in). — Done! I filled one of each other above labeled boxes (except “Keep” which was the stuff that went back in). I took this photo before I labeled the shelves, but they are labeled by what’s in each bin.

Secret surprise if you look in my linen closet: preschool graduation photos of each of my kids!

Today I’m tackling David’s room as part of my Flylady plan. It won’t be done in 15 minutes for sure, but today the desk is getting organized. I’ve been at it an hour now and it’s finally empty. I’ve filled one trash can, one keep box, and one another-room box already. Now I can see why he can’t ever find his school papers. There were a few papers in each messy drawer. AIE!

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

Don’t Just Talk About It, Days 6, 7, 16, & 17

Day 6 I was supposed to clean under the bed.

Cleaning under the bed was mostly easy. I took all the junk out & put it in the holding basket, then put it all away.

Dusted under the bed, then slid the already tidy drawers back in.

Here’s where the cleaning bit gets messy. Day 7 was cleaning the shelving units at the end of my bedroom.

The problem with the shelves is that they are where all the extra stuff is stored: books & movies that have been borrowed but not yet returned (I borrow from a friend that I only see once every 3 or 4 months so it’s a big pile), videos & DVDs from other areas that have been taken out but not put back (mostly because they no longer have a home due to changes in living room furniture), paper goods that need to be filed but can’t because of sleeping David (the file cabinets live in his closet), all our old yearbooks because they can’t live in the moist garage anymore, etc.

So the dilemma is that there’s no longer storage for videos in the living room and my under the bed space is totally filled up. I started going through there and clearing out movies I was pretty sure we’d never watch again or would be easily available through Netflix. I only managed to get rid of about 6 items. Then I moved on to the drawer of them in David’s room (the old TV stand is in there and used as Lego Building Territory, but we’d never cleared out the drawer and had meant to) and got rid of most of those. I also dug through the one drawer in the media cabinet that has DVDs and sorted through those and got also got rid of all our cassette tapes, as we haven’t had a cassette player in years (edited to add: some tapes that had sentimental attachments stayed, such as mix tapes made by us or friends).

I still had too many movies to fit into the tiny drawers in the media cabinet. So I pulled the old media shelves back in from the garage, rearranged a bit of furniture again to accommodate them, and put them back into place. The rest of the videos and DVDs fit there nicely…with lots of room to spare. I started thinking about that extra room and how what I thought I needed for the sheet music was shelves. I ended up pulling out all the music, organizing it by instrument (piano, clarinet, flute, recorder, violin, small percussion), then by book series & level, composer, or genre, depending on the book. Put all those on the bottom shelf and they fit perfectly.

So in the end I worked on days 6, 7, 16, & 17. I still have some more work for day 16 – I’m going through and ripping CDs to mp3 that I never listen to because they can’t go on the iPhone as they currently stand – involving moving quite a few CDs into a “Discard if not used in 6 months” box. But that I’ll leave for later in the month.

I’d hoped to get the rest of the shelves in my room cleared out, but the kids are coming home from their Nana & Pa’s house earlier this morning than I’d expected, so this is as far as I got, which is still so much better than it had been.

Organizing

Iheartorganizing’s Project Purge: Week 2: The Kitchen

I was a bit nervous to start in the kitchen, as I really didn’t think there was much in there that needed to go after all that tidying I did in January. Boy was I wrong!

Project Purge: Kitchen Edition

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Photo1: In 2009 I only had one apron, that black one from the café I worked at in college. It was ugly, so I acquired a few more in nicer colors, but soon realized a couple things: 1) lower half only aprons are silly & don’t help at all and 2) You can only wear one apron at a time, so why have a billion of them? (That last one was the kids art apron, which they never wear these days)

Photo 2: Spare bits of things we don’t use any more. Those glasses are from our wedding. They’ve never been touched again. One was broken immediately after this picture was taken.

Photo 3: These were all hanging on the walls of my kitchen. They don’t go together well and were just taking up what I like to call “eye space.” I took down one other picture, but it’s going in the “find another home in the house” pile rather than the “leaving the house” pile.

Not pictured: a pile of papers & shelf full of glass jars that got recycled and a coffee grinder that got tossed because it ceased to work (it should have gone to the recycling center, too, now that I think about it). Also I’m making up a box of only-for-parties items that can go live in the garage, so I can make better use of the space in the kitchen for things I actually do use a lot (like my muffin pans & cooling racks, which are always impossible to get to).