Peace of Mind Organizing

Missouri sales tax holiday weekend

2 August 2013

Here in Missouri, there’s no state sales tax this weekend on certain back-to-school purchases. That includes:

• clothing (individual articles up to $100)
• school supplies (purchases up to $50)
• software (up to $350)
• computers (up to $3500)
• computer peripherals (up to $3500)

The holiday starts today and goes through Sunday. For more information and definitions of those categories, see the state of Missouri’s website.

Missourians are not the only folks exempt from sales tax this weekend. According to this article on DailyFinance.com, 11 other states are having sales-tax holidays this weekend. They are:

• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• New Mexico
• North Carolina
• Oklahoma
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Virginia

Seven other states will hold tax holiday weekends on a different weekend. This article on cultofmac.com offers a handy chart with links to each state’s information. (Each state has its own rules about what is exempt and what dollar limits apply.)

In five states (Alaska, Delaware, New Hampshire, Montana and Oregon), every day is a sales tax holiday—they don’t charge a state sales tax.

Worth repeating: Beauty vs. function

31 July 2013

I first published this post in September of 2009, and I stand behind my contention that functional trumps beautiful!

I live near a heavily trafficked thoroughfare in St. Louis that has a big median down the middle. A couple of years ago, volunteers from the neighborhood decided to beautify the street by planting large decorative plants in the median. It looks lovely.

Unfortunately, it’s unsafe. I regularly turn left from that street onto another. When I’m waiting to make that turn, the large plants on the median block my view of oncoming traffic. It’s dangerous. Really dangerous. I curse it on a regular basis.

It got me to thinking about beauty versus function, something that I encounter in organizing all the time. People want their spaces to look nice. To many people, looking nice is a big part of being organized. But in their pursuit of aesthetics, people sometimes ignore functionality.

Case in point: say you have a series of pretty binders. You decide to store a certain category of papers in one of the binders which rests on a high shelf with other pretty binders. They look lovely. But in order to file into these binders (or get anything out of them), you have to reach up, remove it from the shelf, open it, find the appropriate section, open the rings, and add (or remove) the papers. (Oh and let’s not get into the hassle of either punching holes in the paper or using a sheet protector…can you tell I’m not a big fan of filing into binders?)

Because it takes so many steps to put something away in that lovely binder, stored attractively with its mates, you don’t do it. You set the papers down into a pile of papers to be filed later. Later never comes. The pile grows, starts feeling overwhelming, and you have an unsightly pile of papers. And a filing chore ahead of you that you dread.

Those binders might look pretty, but if you’re not filing into them they’re not functional.

So what would I recommend instead? For papers, an easy-to-use filing system (I love the Freedom Filer) in an accessible filing cabinet or box.

Functional doesn’t have to be ugly, by any means. But when you’re designing a storage or organizing system, I urge you to pay as much, if not more, attention to how it works as you to do how it looks. That’s a key factor in creating a successful system.

Edited to add: A couple of months after I wrote this, the city of St. Louis repainted the lane lines at this intersection so that the left turn lane is farther left than it used to be. This allows people waiting to make a left turn to see oncoming traffic. They figured out a solution to have both beauty and function at that intersection. Bravo!

Small change, big impact

30 July 2013

My husband and I have lived in our home for 22 years. (Well, four of those 22 years we lived in New York City, so I guess it’s 18 years.)

One of the big frustrations in the house for all those years was the master-bedroom closet had sliding doors. These were oversize sliding doors—in other words, each one was more than half as wide as the closet.

The result? The middle of the closet was essentially unusable space. To make matters worse, when we first moved in, we had a closet company revamp the closet, which was a vast improvement from the rod and shelf that was there. But the new design divided the closet into thirds. So the middle third of the closet was a no-man’s land. That didn’t mean we didn’t store anything there, of course. It just meant we couldn’t easily access what we stored there.

Ever since we moved back to the house from New York twelve years ago, I’d been lobbying to remove those doors and replace them with a curtain. My husband resisted, because he didn’t want our cat going into the closet and leaving cat hair in there. That was a valid concern—Joe liked to scamper into that closet whenever possible.

When Joe passed away in February, I started my lobbying efforts again. About a week ago, we had our handyman remove the closet doors and install a curtain rod above the closet. In advance, I’d purchased these curtain panels from Bed Bath and Beyond.

This past weekend, I set to work decluttering the closet. Oh my goodness, what a difference it’s made to have access to the middle of the closet! It was very easy for me (and even my husband) to donate the clothes we didn’t even know were living there. We also donated some pillows that we’d stored there. And now we have some elbow room in that closet.

I wish I had more dramatic photos, but here are a couple of before and afters.

Lower part before:

Lower part after:

Upper part before:

Upper part after:

Removing those doors and replacing them with the curtains allowed us to:

• Declutter easily
• Store some of my husband’s short- and long-sleeved t-shirts that were in an overcrowded drawer (that’s what’s in those plastic bins)
• Move my jackets off the rod meant for long hanging items and into the middle section
• Make using the closet easy, rather than an exercise in frustration

It was a small, relatively easy shift to make. And it will remove a daily annoyance. How’s that for a payoff?

Video: Jia Jiang's talk from the World Domination Summit

26 July 2013

On July 8, I blogged about one of my favorite speakers from the World Domination Summit. Jia Jiang spoke about his experience with trying to get over the fear of rejection by asking for ridiculous things and trying to be rejected. He found rejection is less likely than you might think when you ask for something.

The message of his talk was powerful. But it was also his humble-humorous manner of presenting that made the talk so memorable.

I’m delighted that the powers that be at the World Domination Summit have chosen Jia’s talk as the first they’ve posted to be freely viewed and shared. Here it is.

Jia Jiang from Chris Guillebeau on Vimeo.

If you have a spare 25 minutes or so, sit back and enjoy. I bet it will change the way you think about rejection.

Dresser transformation

24 July 2013

One of the habits I’ve tried to create over the years is to put away my clothes properly at night (either in the closet/drawer or down the laundry chute), rather than piling them on the top of my dresser, as I’m inclined to do.

I’ve had various levels of success with this. I started to realize that part of the problem is that even when I clear off the dresser, it’s not particularly clear. In other words, I store too much stuff on it. So even when it’s supposedly cleared off, it feels clutter. And as you probably know, clutter attracts clutter.

So last week, I decided to take a hard look at what I store on the top of the dresser. And I was a little surprised at what I saw lurking there. Here’s a before picture.

If you look closely, you can see there’s an overabundance of (mostly failed) storage solutions for jewelry. There’s also my basket of tights. There are a couple of shawls. And, the day the picture was taken, a couple of t-shirts I’d been given on a recent trip that hadn’t found a home.

So I focused on clearing off that dresser. It may have taken me as much as an hour. I donated a quart-size bag full of jewelry I haven’t worn in years. I removed two of the jewelry boxes. I found new homes for the shawls and for the new shirts. Since it’s summer, I removed the tights basket to the downstairs closet where I store some out-of-season clothes. (I’ll bring it back to the bureau top in the winter.) I put the stray buttons I’d found into my button jar. And I found and discarded old tags cut off of clothes.

Here’s the after picture:

It’s been a solid week and I’ve had no trouble keeping it clear. Because there’s so much clear surface, I have no interest in adding anything!

This is inspiring all sorts of decluttering projects around the house. We just had the sliding doors removed from our clothes closet and replaced with curtains. Today’s project: decluttering and organizing that closet. I’ll report back here on the blog!

I heart The Container Store

19 July 2013

I spent two hours today at The Container Store here in St. Louis working with an Elfa designer named Meg. I was getting a design for a client project (organizing systems for two garages). I walked in there with a general idea of what I needed. Meg asked me questions that helped bring things into focus. Then she set to work creating the designs (five in all) and we spent a good amount of time tweaking them.

Talk about organizer heaven! I had a great time and am really happy with what we’re presenting the client. I’m thrilled that I can pass on to my client the 20 percent Elfa discount the Container Store offers members of the National Association of Professional Organizers.

I often wish we had an IKEA here in St. Louis. But if I had to choose between the Container Store and IKEA, the Container Store would win hands down. Their customer service is unparalleled, in my opinion.

Big thank yous to Meg and to the Container Store!

Worth repeating: Good intentions

17 July 2013

On Wednesdays this summer, I’m dipping into my archives to highlight articles written in the past with messages that bear repeating. Here’s the latest, originally posted on October 14, 2010.

The other day I cleaned out my t-shirt drawer. One of the benefits of having a friend who runs a t-shirt company and creates fabulous new t-shirts designs on a regular basis is that I’m frequently given new t-shirts. I don’t want to say no to them, because they’re wonderful. But I wasn’t employing any kind of “one in/one out” policy.

So it had become difficult to put away my t-shirts because the drawer was so full.

Weeding out the drawer was actually more challenging than I expected, because some of the shirts had some sort of sentimental value. (Commemorative t-shirts from family reunions or half marathons I’d walked, for instance.) So to make it easier on myself, I decided that rather than donate the shirts, I’d cut them into tubes, loops the tubes together and knit with them.

I created quite a large stack of shirts that I was going to turn into a big craft project. I put them in a large shopping bag from the Container Store and left them on the bedroom floor. I thought about the next steps to transform these shirts into something functional (I thought I’d make a bathmat):

1. Buy a rotary cutter to cut the shirts into tubes (which meant I’d want to find a coupon first for the fabric store, to get a good deal on the rotary cutter).
2. Loop all the tubes together into a giant ball of “yarn”
3. Find a pattern or just decide how big I wanted the bathmat and how many stitches to cast on.
4. Take the project I currently have on giant needles off, so I could use those needles, or buy a set of US#35 circular needles.
5. Knit the thing. I knew from past experience that knitting with giant needles is actually kind of painful. (I once knit a really ugly rug out of potholder loops.)

The whole project didn’t sound like a ton of fun, but I was game.

Then, a day later, I came home to find the bag moved from the bedroom to the hall. My husband told me that the American Kidney Fund had called and asked if we had anything to donate. He remembered the bag of shirts (but forgot I was planning to knit with them) and scheduled a pick up. He apologized when I reminded him of my plans for that shirt.

I thought about finding other things to donate so I could keep the shirts to knit with. Then I thought about all the steps to getting my shirts ready to turn into a bathmat. Then I thought about whether I needed a bathmat made of t-shirts. Or whether I really wanted to knit one.

Then I decided to give away the shirts. I put that bag on the porch. And I felt liberated.

With my clients, I often see that they’d rather do something complicated with an item they’re ready to let go of. They strive for the perfect way to discard. Instead of just donating it to Goodwill, they’re going to take it to their kids’ school. Or mail it to a charity that has a special need for it. Or send it to a relative. And often that unwanted item sits in limbo—still clutter— because they don’t get around to doing that action.

That’s probably what would have happened with my t-shirts. They’d have sat in that bag on my bedroom floor, or perhaps moved to the room where I store my knitting supplies. After awhile they’d become invisible. Or I would have actually started cutting them into tubes and maybe even knit with them, but they’d have taken a bunch of time that I could have spent knitting something beautiful.

So once again I learned to take the easy road.Do the thing that takes fewer steps. It was very easy for me to just let the charity pick up that bag. And I can assure you that I don’t miss those shirts one bit. Nor am I itching to make a bathmat.