I’m stealing borrowing a blog topic from Kjersten today. She is talking on her blog about her current organizing projects and challenges. I love all things organizing, so I thought I’d do the same.
1. CLUTTER I am forever at war with clutter. With paper clutter I try to immediately eliminate what I can (junk mail) and then scan the rest to our fileserver. Tabby’s art work has a box in her closet (rapidly getting full) that we put the A list stuff in. The rest, I am a bit chagrined to admit, goes in the trash. All the rest of the clutter is subject to my rather heavy tossing hand. I randomly attack sections of our house that look too “full” and toss toss toss. Closets, dressers, drawers, pantry … nothing is safe from me. As soon as I get one section done, I notice two others that need attention. It’s never ending. I make a conscious effort not to buy or otherwise acquire junk, but nonetheless, we still manage to ship off a box or two to Good Will every month.
2. KID STUFF Any parent can commiserate I’m sure. Kids just have tons of stuff. They outgrow toys, clothes, books, kitchen equipment, DVDs, and even furniture at an alarming rate. That means I’m always trying to sort out the discarded. Clothes are especially tricky because sometimes they might be able to wear something next season, but meanwhile it’s taking up space in their drawers. Yet if you put it away you might not remember to take it out in time. I’m sure Martha has a perfect system but I don’t!
The other thing we’re running into now is a reluctance from my kids to get rid of things, even if they never play with it or have 15 just like it. So I take a similar tact with the kids’ rooms that I do with everywhere else. When I can’t stands it no more, I go nuts and fill up boxes to go to Good Will or friends. But it seems like barely a month passes and I’m back at square one all over.
3. BLACK HOLE PANTRY Of all of the many things I love about our house, the #1 thing I HATE about it is our crap pantry. I’m not even sure you could call it that. It’s just a giant, DEEP, DARK Black hole food cabinet. We have discussed myriad solutions to the problem, but (arguably) the best one involves moving our washer and dryer into Matt’s shop (in the basement) and neither of us wants that, though for very different reasons (he: wants his shop space, me: lazy). So I am now hounding him about installing one of these swing out pantry contraptions in order to fix the black hole scenario. It’s pretty much still in the theoretical stages.
4. BEN’S ROOM My forgotten second child is still living in a thrown-together castoffs sort of bedroom. I don’t think he cares, but I of course feel some amount of mommy guilt over this. Fairly soon, as I have mentioned, he will probably need a big boy bed and at that time we will get him new furniture and decorate and organize his room properly … so that maybe it won’t look like a home office with a crib and some board books thrown in.
Wow! What a weekend. We are usually quite productive but I must say, even I’m a bit in awe at what we accomplished this weekend. Thursday we found out that our friends needed us to watch their boys from Friday night through mid-day Saturday. They are great kids and play so well with ours we never mind. So Saturday morning, after Breakfast Creme Brulee, we sent the kids down to the playroom and watched them on the video monitor while we went nuts on the kitchen. We cleaned out the pantry (way way overdue) and also dumped out and organized three drawers. In the garage, we cleaned out and organized the garage pantry (i.e. Costco Overflow) and cleaned up the area in front of it to make it easier to access. It was punctuated by interruptions by kids, but we got a LOT accomplished in a relatively small amount of time.
