Peace of Mind Organizing

Creating a vision

30 June 2008

Whenever I start working with a client, we talk about the vision they have for the space. I’m not talking about specifics like furniture placement. I want to know what the client is hoping to experience in the room, the feeling that she wants to get from the space. I ask the client to close her eyes and really feel it.

Then, when we’re working on decluttering, sometimes I evoke that vision. If the client has elected to hang on to something that I don’t feel would contribute to the vision, I’ll ask: “Does keeping that item support your vision for this space?” Often that will lead to a change of heart about keeping the item. For most of my clients, letting go of a lot of stuff is really important to creating order in their homes.

I recently used this process on myself. On Friday, while I was waiting at the auto mechanic’s shop, I started a to-do list for the weekend. It was grim. Here’s that list verbatim:

Tidy and vacuum and dust upstairs
Clean kitchen floor
Sort out closets in the main office
Put away stuff into new furniture

Now, I do like sorting, but that list, short as it was, made me dread the weekend.

So I changed it to:

Vision: Bright, clean, clutter-free upstairs
Strategies:

• Put stuff away
• Vacuum
• Dust
• Wash kitchen and bathroom floors
• Vacuum stairs

Vision: Neat and organized home offices
Strategies:

• Break up and dispose of boxes
• Empty all other trash
• Get B. to help me move furniture
• Fill cubbies in Expedit
• Put stuff away in cabinet
• Clear out and reorganize cubbies in white bookshelf
• Move scanner to copier stand
• Finish shredding

(For background, we live in a two-family home. Our main living space is on the second floor, including the living room and kitchen. My offices, my husband’s pastry kitchen and the guest room are on the first floor.)

Somehow, making those tasks support a vision made them much more palatable. I didn’t get all the tasks done, but I came close. And I managed to do some knitting, watch the first disk of the wonderful 1999 TV series Freaks and Geeks and read a book this weekend.

I encourage you to give it a try. When you’re thinking about transforming a space in your home, whether it be through decluttering, organizing, or decorating, create a vision for the space and really feel the feelings within you that you want the space to evoke. Then, when you’re faced with decision, or just tasks, use your vision to guide you.

I hate breaking the chain!

27 June 2008

Yesterday was a big day because my awesome and awe-inspiring friend, Sally, came over to help me put together the IKEA furniture I purchased last week. (“Help me” being a euphemism for actually doing all the work.) It took all afternoon and once I clean up the mess and put everything away, I’ll post pictures.

In any case, it took a little longer than the time we had budgeted, so after Sally left, there was a scramble to get to a date we had at a friend’s house.

My point: I didn’t clear off my desk yesterday before ending the work day. The reason is that end of the work day didn’t involve my desk. But still, it was a shock to arrive at my desk this morning and see some clutter on it. The worse part is that it was very little clutter—it would have literally taken about 60 seconds or less to put everything away.

I’d been working since January 5 to create the habit of clearing my desk at the end of each day. I use the website Don’t Break the Chain to help me.

Now, I also broke the blog-writing chain yesterday but that doesn’t bother me as much. I’ve come to the realization that I really need to write my blog post in the morning, before walking my dogs, or it becomes a bit of a hardship. (I have a separate chain to motivate me to blog five days a week.)

The clean-desk chain was going along so well. This was just the third break since January 5. So here’s how my clean-desk chain looks so far for 2008:

Every red box is a day I cleared my desk at the end of the day.

I’m looking forward to building up the chain of red again. It’s incredibly motivating for me. If you have a habit you’d like to instill, I encourage you to try it!

Organizing Playground: Blog of the Week

25 June 2008

This week’s blog of the week is actually a podcast (though it does have a blog associated with it). Organizing Playground is a weekly radio show out of Atlanta hosted by professional organizers Allison Carter and Sara Fisher.

Each week, for an hour, Sara and Allison discuss some aspect of organizing, with great guest experts and lots of fun commentary. In fact, the show is all about having fun while organizing.

I subscribed to the show as a podcast in iTunes (search on Organizing Playground). It’s free and new episodes are automatically downloaded into my iTunes library. When I synch my iPod, the shows are moved to it. So when I’m driving, I often have the opportunity to listen to a new show.

If you prefer (or if you want to call in), you can listen to the show live on Tuesdays from 1 to 2 pm eastern time.

You can download past shows, if you’d like. Be sure to check out the May 13, 2008, episode which featured an interview with my pal Aby Garvey.

Organizing my yarn collection and knitting supplies

24 June 2008

Yesterday I posted about my new Elfa drawer system which now stores my yarn, knitting needles and notions. Here are the specs: I purchased three 10-runner drawer frames (41 inches high) and platinum mesh baskets with platinum tops over the whole thing. I have three sets of drawers—two medium and one narrow. The way I configured my set, I have 16 drawers to work with, 3 one-runner (shallow), 12 two-runner (medium) and one three-runner (deep).

Here’s how it looks:

For the knitters out there, today I’m sharing the categories I used for my stash and how I’m storing my needles and notions. Organizing yarn is like organizing anything else—it should be organized how you use it. So the way I organize my yarn needn’t be a model for anyone else; it’s just what works for me. But if you’re like me, someone who loves knitting and organizing, you might find my organizing decisions interesting.

Five of the drawers contain general categories of yarn:

• Worsted wool
• Bulky wool (that’s in the deep drawer)
• Cotton
• Novelty/special use yarn (like sock yarn and baby yarn)
• Remnants (partial balls of yarn from past projects)

I have larger groups of leftover yarn from projects and also a bunch of yarn from a sweater I frogged (unraveled), so three drawers contain specific yarn:

• Knit Picks Panache and Decadence
• Knit Picks Shine, which I purchased for a poncho I never made
• Silky Wool and Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Super Chunky

Works in Progress (WiPs) take up two of the drawers:

• Active WiPs
• Kits I’m not working on and hibernated WiPs

My ultimate WiP takes up two drawers. It’s the Barbara Walker Learn-to Knit Afghan, in which I’ll eventually make 63 8 × 8-inch squares, each in a different stitch pattern. So far I’ve completed 50 of the squares, but the lace section frustrated me so I put it down. Here’s a link to Timothy Hunt’s completed squares.

The two drawers for the Afghan are:

• Finished squares (most of which are blocked)
• Current square-in-progress (and the bag it lives in), as well as yarn purchased for the project

That leaves three drawers for supplies (one of my medium drawers is gloriously empty. I have room to grow!) They are:

• Notions (this is a shallow drawer with which I’ve fitted the Container Store’s divided drawer tray)
• Notion bags (for when I take notions on the road)
• Circular needles—I have one Knit Picks Options interchangeable circular needle set in a binder case and a fisherman’s worm binder housing my fixed circular needles. Those live together in one drawer.

My straight needles are displayed in glass vases on top of the drawer set (divided as follows: long needles, size US10 and higher, long needles, size smaller than US10, short needles of any size, and double-pointed needles, in their packages).

Here’s how they look right now:

Patterns, books and magazines will go in the glass-fronted cabinet I purchased last week. Patterns are in sheet protectors in binders and magazines will be housed in magazine holders. It will be a great improvement over the messy shelf on a bookcase they take up now.

Finally, all my drawers are labeled. I purchased the mesh drawer label holders from the Container Store and used a pretty font in Word (Honey Script Light) on clear Avery labels affixed to the blank labels that came with the label holders. Here’s a (slightly blurry) close up of one of the labels:

The nice thing about this system is that it will be easy to adapt if my stash changes, or the way I use my stash changes. I’m very pleased!

Better living through Elfa

23 June 2008

As I’ve blogged about before, I’m a knitter and I love organizing all my knitting stuff. There’s yarn, needles, notions, patterns. They fall into nice categories and they’re pretty. So they’re fun to organize.

For the longest time, I used pop-up cubes to organize various categories of yarn. Here’s a picture of one of mine.

I used to use these cubes to store my yarn

They worked pretty well, but they also looked kind of messy on the floor, since I had about six of them. To organize my straight knitting needles, I used an over-the-door shoe organizer:

And I used project bags to organize my works in progress:

My works in progress

All that was functional, if not terribly beautiful. When I decided to repurpose a room in my house as a second home office, I decided to reorganize my knitting stuff and move it into the room. This allowed me to scratch a long-standing itch: it gave me a reason to buy Elfa.

As you may know, Elfa is the closet-organizing system exclusively available at the Container Store. Among the Elfa offerings are drawer systems. Pretty drawer systems in which drawers glide effortlessly on runners. Functional, adaptable drawer systems that are highly customizable.

It took me awhile to decide exactly what I wanted, but decide I did. Last week I purchased it. And in a matter of about an hour I had it all set up and organized. It’s a beautiful thing to behold:

All my yarn and supplies are in one place!

For you knitters, tomorrow I’ll write about the categories I chose to organize my yarn and how I organized my needles and works in progress.

The room itself is still a work in progress—I need to assemble the IKEA furniture I purchased on Friday (much more daunting than Elfa), and organize all the contents. But for the moment, I can walk through the room and gaze at my knitting Elfa station with extreme satisfaction.

Decisions

21 June 2008

Many of my clients have a difficult time making decisions. That’s not too surprising, since most of my clients are dealing with clutter issues and clutter is all about delayed decisions.

Sometimes they agonize over what seems like a clear choice to me. I think it boils down to confidence in their ability to make the right choice, as well as an understanding that the consequences (most often) aren’t dire. If they had more confidence about decision making and better perspective on the importance of the decision, they’d be more decisive.

I got a first-hand taste of this on my expedition to IKEA, the European home-furnishings store which has a plethora of attractive, low-cost, assemble-yourself furniture. Unfortunately, we don’t have an IKEA in St. Louis. The closest one is in Chicago (where they have two!). So I got up early and drove nearly five hours to IKEA. I knew one piece of furniture I wanted (actually, two of the same cubby bookshelf, Expedit) but I still had a storage problem I hadn’t solved. I was hoping for inspiration while shopping.

If only I could have taken someone along. My confidence in my home-decor decisions can falter. As I walked through IKEA—and if you’ve ever been there, you know it’s a giant maze you’re forced to walk through so you see everything on display—I experienced sensory overload. There were so many options and I had to keep my eye open for the right storage solution for my second home office. I found it agonizing.

I finally reached the home-office area and thought I’d found what I needed. Phew. But my stress levels spiked as I realized there were at least dozen more choices I had to make just for this storage solution. It didn’t help that there was a screaming child in the same area. And loud music over the PA system. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears as I made choices about what components I wanted, what finish, what legs, what drawer pulls…it made me want to tear my hair out.

Here’s what I ended up with. It’s the Effektiv unit. I had room for only a single unit…mine basically looks like the unit on the left, except with two file drawers, rather than one file drawer and a pair of drawers:

Once I found Effektiv and made all those decisions—they carried the illusion of importance, because I couldn’t easily return the items if I chose poorly— I started to feel at peace.

At peace, but also exhausted and hungry. The big decisions were behind me and now I had to choose accessories. Luckily for me, my friend, Sally, was home and answering her phone on the first ring. She helped me decide what length legs I needed for my Expedit (I’m going to use it on its side, as a work surface) and affirmed some of my accessory decisions.

When I got to the very end of my shopping ordeal (by this time I felt like I was in the fourth circle of hell) I found IKEA was out of the very last item on my list, the frosted glass doors for the cabinet I was purchasing.

Suddenly I was faced with another set of decisions. Do I get the cabinet doors with the etched floral design or wood doors instead of glass? Or I do I get the shiny beige doors? Do I drive to the other Chicago IKEA to get the doors I prefer? Or do I order them and have them shipped? I don’t know what I would have done without Sally. Thanks to her wise counsel and willingness to call the online store (mysteriously, the IKEA staff couldn’t tell me what it would cost to ship the doors), I came to the sensible decision to head home and purchase the doors online and have them shipped.

I made many, many decisions yesterday, which is what my clients have to do whenever we have a decluttering session. (I sure hope our decluttering sessions are less stressful than a trip to IKEA!) I always give my clients props for all the effort behind those decisions. But after yesterday, my admire them even more.

Once I get my office set up, I’ll post about it. Can’t wait to show off the furniture!

The week of barely being home

19 June 2008

I’ve devoted an extraordinary amount of time this week to my vision. I spent all day Monday looking for my old glasses before my eye appointment (and I never found them). Between Monday and today, I’ve been to the eyeglass place three times. I got new glasses (progressive trifocals…I’m officially middle aged), as well as new prescription sunglasses. I’m on my second pair of regular glasses. I love Lenscrafters 30-day satisfaction guarantee. I think these will actually work out well. I must say, it’s nice to see well again!!

Anyway, I’ve barely been at home all week and tomorrow I’m making a quick trip to IKEA in the Chicago suburbs—4.5 hours from here—to buy some furnishings for my new second home office.

The main thing I’m after is two of these:

Expedit

Heaven knows I’ll buy a few accessories while I’m there as well.

I’ll blog with great enthusiasm about my office once it’s furnished and organized. I can’t imagine I won’t come up with some insights to share while I’m at IKEA, or at least while I’m spending 9 hours in the car tomorrow.

Since I hope to leave at 7 am tomorrow, I don’t expect I’ll post to my blog. But perhaps I will over the weekend.