Make Room for Love

“I moved out of my parent’s house so I could meet people and find a guy, but I am ashamed to bring anybody into this mess,” the young professional woman lamented as her eyes swept around her cluttered living room. After six months in her condominium, it was littered with a load of work papers, magazines and an assortment of shoes. Mail was stacked up on the table in the entryway and the view of the kitchen revealed dishes stacked in the sink and cartons on the counter. A tour of the bathroom and bedroom revealed they were in similar disarray. The spare bedroom had turned into storage space for everything that had not yet been put away. There were still unpacked boxes from her move-in.

“ I work hard and when I get home, I just crash,” she told me.

The first step for this client was finding a balance between work and personal life-a hard thing to do when she is trying to impress her boss and hang on to her job. She was able to identify four hours a week she could devote to gaining control of her environment without affecting work performance. She also identified four hours a week to devote to herself and fun things. Now she was ready to tackle the task of getting her home in shape.


The first step was to determine what was really important to her. She decided that she wanted to be able to invite some friends over for an informal gathering. She set a goal for two months to have her space in shape in order to send the invitations. That meant she had to organize the entryway, the living room and the bathroom. She also had to clean up the kitchen which could be viewed from the living area.

For the entryway we set up a mail station using attractive baskets with lids that allowed for the sorting of mail on the spot. One basket was for bills and other mail that needed immediate attention. The other was for mail that could be handled at her leisure. If that basket got full, it needed to be dealt with immediately to make room for the next bunch of mail. This system allowed bills to get paid on time and put a physical limit on how much mail could pile up.

The clutter culprits in the living room were paper, magazines and shoes. She confessed to taking off her shoes at the door and neglecting to tote them upstairs to the bedroom for several days, or weeks. To deal with the shoe problem she bought a hall bench that contained a hidden shoe rack in the base. She put her favorite shoes here so she could pick them up and put them away on her way in and out of the house. She also purchased a step basket that fit on the stairs and allowed her to drop off things that she wanted to carry upstairs on her next trip.

She already had a magazine rack that she didn’t use. It was too small and was not near the sofa where she usually did her reading. A large flat basket on the bottom shelf of the coffee table helped corral the periodicals and gave the appearance of order.

She did her paperwork all over the house, an apt metaphor for work taking over her life. We identified a corner of the room for work purposes and organized all work materials in an attractive trunk that had been in the storage room since her move. She could still review projects sitting on her couch or at the dining table, but they went in her briefcase or in the trunk after review.

The kitchen was a matter of cleanup and adopting new habits of washing dishes at least once a day, since she had no dishwasher. Moving utensil and dish storage nearer to the sink made the job a little easier. A larger trash can with a lid helped minimize used containers on the counter and kept garbage out of sight.

The bathroom suffered from a lack of storage space for toiletries and makeup so these items ended up on the limited counter space. Under sink storage shelves and shower shelves helped provide additional space for toiletries. Makeup was sorted and outdated and unused items were discarded. What was left was stored in the medicine cabinet using plastic and magnetic containers.

She had a successful gathering for her friends and has now started working on upstairs space. Her goal is to have that done in two more months. It seems there is a special guy in the picture and she needs to make room for love.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Taking Care of Little Things

Even after we organize our desk, our sewing box, our craft area, our toolbox, it is the little things that cause problems with maintaining our neat space. Paper clips, straight pins, little beads and tiny nails find their way to the bottom of our stuff.

Here are a few low-cost suggestions for corralling those pesky items and keeping things in order.

Ÿ Items with blunt edges do well in small zip-lock plastic bags. Beads can be separated by colors and then placed together in a larger container.

Ÿ Egg cartons provide a handy way to sort items like nuts and bolts. Glue a small magnet in each section to keep them in place. Be sure to store on top of heavy tools or the container will get crushed.

Ÿ Slip a plastic ice cube tray in your desk drawer to hold various size paper clips, staples and other small items.

Ÿ Baby food jars and spice jars can be re-purposed to hold small items. Spice jars in a discarded spice rack can keep sewing items like snaps and pins handy for the seamstress.

Organizing doesn’t have to be fancy; it just has to work.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

WHEN AM I ORGANIZED ENOUGH?

I love to watch the home makeover and organizing programs when I can. Sometimes I am inspired, sometimes I get good ideas for difficult problems, and sometimes I just laugh. One of the recent programs that tickled my funny bone was a redesign and organization for a busy single mother of four with a demanding job. As they toured her through the pristine and orderly residence her house had become, I found myself inventing internal dialogue for the poor woman.

“What a nice foyer, (but will my children really walk to the end of the hall and open a door to dump their backpacks?”)

“Oh, yes, that is a lovely laundry room (until I feed the dog and try to do a week’s worth of laundry on Saturday.”)

“The bathroom is so neat (but what will it look like when my teenager litters it with hair products and make-up?”)

“I can find everything in this pantry (until I drag in my first batch of groceries and put them wherever they fit.”)

The organized space looked beautiful, but it was not very practical for this family. Finding the balance between pretty and practical, form and function is often overlooked when folks organize spaces that have to work for them everyday. When we invest time and effort, we expect things to improve. Looking good is an improvement if the organization is maintained with the same or less amount of work.

Often we have a limited amount of time and money to spend on organization projects. How can we decide where to put our resources for the biggest improvement? How do we decide when we are organized enough?

In the real world, where people with limited resources lead busy lives, I believe you are organized enough when:

• Spaces are safe and you can walk across rooms without stumbling on items
  
• You can find what you are looking for in five minutes.
  
• You can pick up the public spaces for an unexpected guest to visit in 15 minutes.
  
• You can get ready for a critical relative or friend to visit in one day.
  
• There are no (or few) outdated products in your refrigerator, freezer, pantry.
  
• You and your family can access clothes and other items when you need them
  
• Bills, projects, homework, permission slips are not past due because you have misplaced the papers.
  
• You can get into bed and have dinner at your table without clearing it first.
  
• You are happy and comfortable living in your home.
  

If you are not there yet, keep trying. You may want to take a look at some programs about organizing. Even if you don’t learn anything, you could have a good laugh.


Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

The Secrets to Staying Organized

So you have finally gotten your closet organized. Your family room is no longer cluttered and you are feeling pretty pleased with yourself. Then a few weeks pass and you look around and things are not as organized as they used to be. What happened? You were so committed to living in organized surroundings and now you are slipping back to clutter central.

Something isn’t working. Is it you or is it the system?

Sad to say, there are no magic secrets to staying organized, but there are a few guidelines that help.

Assess what is not working for you. Is it the system that is taking too much time and effort? Is it a lack of unity among family members in maintaining the system? Is it failure to take time to maintain the system? Once you have an idea of the obstacle, you can take measures to correct it.

Pick a system that fits your lifestyle. If you are better at dumping than you are at filing, use containers that conceal the jumble that you dump. If you are not going to keep books in alphabetical order by author, place them according to height, an easier and less time-consuming alternative. If it is important for you to have to-do items where you can see them, seek alternatives that allow them to be in view but contained in an attractive way.

Have a designated place for all your possessions. Even if the towels are not always neatly stacked, you will know they are on the third shelf of the linen closet. That is not beautiful organization, but you can still put your hands on a towel when you need one. Additionally, other family members do not have to rummage to find what they are looking for, creating more disorder in the process. Once you have decided on a home for the objects, enforce it with yourself and others.

Schedule time to keep things organized. Some things our clients have shared that work for them are:

Everyone picks up things that are out of place before they go to bed each night.
A reward is given each Sunday to the family member who has the fewest things out of place. Schedule fifteen minutes everyday to tackle an area that is sliding back to chaos. If there is no area to rescue, do something you enjoy.

Realize that sometimes life happens and things get a little out of control. In that case, just start again. One of our clients was looking forward to creating beautiful things in her newly organized office and craft space. Then her sister got sick and required help with her recovery, her father died and she brought many things from her childhood into the space. Then a flood filled the basement and she saved some possessions by moving them to any space available. Is it any wonder that her space became disorganized? The good news was that it took much less time to get it back in order because we already had a blueprint for how she wanted to use the space and where things were stored. It was then a matter of finding designated space for the excess items in the room. So when you have to start again, you never start from zero because you learn something from your first effort.

So the “secrets” to staying organized are: pick a system that fits your lifestyle, schedule time to maintain it and, if clutter happens, learn from your first attempt and try again.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Organize Crafts

March is National Craft Month. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines craft as skill in planning, making and executing or the product derived from that activity. So you would think that all crafters were organized folks. In our experience, the crafters are organized but their space isn’t. Their creative minds see all kinds of possibilities for scraps of and discarded containers. And then there are the tools for accomplishing the craft. Whether the passion is scrapbooking, or sewing, woodworking or needlework, beading or collage, the challenge is where to keep all the stuff you need to get the job done?

Here are a few suggestions for organizing the crafting space:

Define a room, a closet, or a corner of a room as the crafting area. The whole house is not the craft workshop. (or so many spouses have told us)

Put like objects with like objects: tools together, ribbon together, pattern books together.

Work on one project at a time and put it away before you pull out another. If you switch up frequently ( for instance while glue is setting or paint is drying) have the drying station and work station side by side so tools and resources do not get scattered.

Create storage space in the craft area. This can be a cabinet, shelves or stackable boxes. Use discarded egg cartons or ice trays to organize beads, plastic margarine containers to store ribbon, a multi-tiered magazine rack for pattern books and scapbook paper. Clear plastic containers of varying sizes are available to store most items and they stack easily.

Take a look at innovative storage solutions. If you decide not to buy them, you can mimic their creative ideas through the use of materials you may have on hand. Two sites worth visiting are www.theoriginalscrapbox.com and www.twopweasinabasket.com

We hope you enjoy a month of organized crafting pleasure.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net