Peace of Mind Organizing

Why decluttering is so important

3 March 2016

I met with a client recently who explained all the storage solutions she and her husband had attempted in an effort to create order. They have three kids and a small house and it felt to them like their home was bursting at the seams. Yet their storage solutions hadn’t solved the problem.

My comment to her was that one way to get things to fit better into their home was to have fewer belongings.

Decluttering is an important first step in the organizing process.

Decluttering should be embraced, not skipped, because when you let go of those items that don’t serve you, it is so much easier to organize what remains.

I was reading some old blog posts this morning and came across one from eight years ago in which I detailed some organizing projects in my own home. My 2016 self started twitching when I read this sentence, “Last weekend, I started doing some shifting of closet contents in order to help alleviate some clothes storage problems.” No, I thought! Don’t shift things around. Get rid of things! I know that in 2008 I had a lot more clothes than I have now. And I know I still have more than I need.

When we own fewer items we have less to manage. When we distill our items down to those things that we use and love, then we can easily find what we need and put it away. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Life is easier when you have less stuff.

Next time you have the itch to organize, see how much you can let go of before you start the actual organizing. Don’t move things around, move things out. Resist the temptation to buy organizing supplies or storage solutions before you declutter.

If you declutter prior to organizing, you set yourself up for success. When you have fewer items to organize (and manage), everything becomes easier.

What will you do with your extra day?

25 February 2016

This Monday is February 29. I love leap year because we get a whole extra day in the year. What a gift!

I like to ponder how I’ll spend that extra day. This year, I’ve decided I will spend it relaxing and enjoying myself. No clients, no admin work. I think I’ll go to a movie. I may do some genealogy research. Maybe knit or color. Sleep in. Perhaps I’ll persuade my husband to go out to lunch with me.

It sounds delightful and I’m eagerly anticipating it.

How about you? Do you think of February 29 as a special day? How will you spend it?

A storage solution for my colored Sharpies

22 February 2016

Several weeks ago, I blogged about organizing my coloring supplies. I enjoy coloring in coloring books intended for grown ups and I use colored pencils and Sharpies primarily.

In that blog post, I showed how I organize my dozens of colored pencils. (I use Prismacolor Premier pencils.) And I mentioned that I had yet to figure out a good way to organize my colored Sharpies. At the time, they were laying flat in a box all mixed together.

Well, I’ve figured out a method that’s working well for me! I separated the Sharpies by color family and am now storing them upright in mugs. I wanted to use canning jars, but didn’t have a sufficient supply on hand. I have more coffee mugs than I need (most of them are souvenirs), and this seemed like a great way to use them.

This is how I was storing them, completely ineffectively.

And here they are sorted. The mug on the top left contains the Sharpies I was using for a specific coloring page.

I stored the mugs on top of a CD shelf we have in our living room. It’s not the most inspired piece of home decor, but it’s not offensive. I just bring the mug with the current colors over to the area in which I’m coloring.

This has proven to be a simple and effective solution for me! (And I didn’t invest any money in storage solutions!)

Worth repeating: I'm officially hooked on working with POs

18 February 2016

Five-and-a-half years ago, professional organizer Aby Garvey rocked my world by helping me reorganize (and rethink) my pantry. This weekend my plan is to declutter and fine tune my pantry, which has gotten out of control (as pantries have a tendency to do). I’m taking inspiration from this post I wrote after that initial session. If you have a pantry (or other space) to organize this weekend, maybe you’ll find it inspiring, too!

Last month I blogged about working with professional organizer Karel Worley in my basement. With my husband’s help, we tackled a dirty decluttering job in only four hours. It was one that I’d been dreading for months. It was amazing how much we got done and how painless it was.

Well, I’m at it again. My friend, Aby Garvey, of simplify101, and I have been talking about swapping services for awhile. We thought it would be more fun (and a lot faster) to work together on some of our projects at home.

I got to go first. Last week, Aby came to my home to help me organize my pantry. I was really excited; I didn’t feel a speck of dread. I couldn’t wait to see what Aby’s ideas for my very crowded pantry would be.

My husband, Barry, was always complaining that he couldn’t find stuff in the pantry. I knew where stuff was, but it was so clogged with expired food that I couldn’t tell at a glance what was there. So I would buy more food, exacerbating the problem.

Here’s the layout of the pantry. It’s essentially the size of a small coat closet, with fixed shelves on the right side. We’d added a custom-made extra-tall metro shelving unit on the left wall, opposite the fixed shelves. There’s a rack of shelves on the inside of the door as well.

Once Aby took a look at it, she made a simple, brilliant suggestion. She suggested we turn the metro shelving unit 90 degrees and put it in the back of the closet. That would allow us to see what was on it without stepping into the pantry. That had literally never occurred to me.

We started by emptying the contents of the pantry, tossing expired things and sorting what was left. Then we turned the shelf as Aby suggested, replaced the shelf liner on the fixed shelves and set to work putting stuff back. We put things away in the order they’re used (the categories with the most frequently used items were put away first, so they’d get the prime real estate).

What was so great is that Aby thinks of space differently than I do. Working with her I realized that I was thinking more about how things fit, rather than their function. For example, I had only small things stored on the small shelves on the door. Aby (rightly) proclaimed those shelves prime real estate (I hadn’t thought of them that way) and put the stuff we use most often there. Of course!

I’d also made an artificial separation between what was stored on the fixed shelves (primarily bowls and implements) and what was stored on the metro shelving (primarily food). Aby suggested eliminating that division and created a space where the two flowed together. The mixing bowls ended up on the deeper metro shelving, where they’re much easier to access. We got the pet food up off the floor onto the bottom shelf of the metro shelving.

The whole process was really fun, and once again, I enjoyed being in my clients’ shoes. For example, I was really interested in hearing Aby’s ideas, rather than expressing my own. I was more than willing to defer to Aby and I really sort of expected she’d come in and magically transform the space. She didn’t disappoint!

It was great to gaze at the new pantry when we were finished. Even better, it’s been great to use the new space. When I cooked dinner that night, the supplies I needed were right on the door. When I went to the grocery store a couple of days later, I actually enjoyed putting away food, because I had room to do it! When we were having some friends over this weekend, I could tell at a glance what food we had to nibble on and I was able to quickly put together a shopping list.

And don’t even get me started on the food-storage containers! That’s a post for another day (this week, I promise). That looked like an impossible challenge and the solution, which I initially doubted, has proven to be fantastic.

Here are a couple of before-and-after pictures, courtesy of Aby, whose photography skills clearly exceed mine.

The pantry was clogged. The pet food, paper bags, and garbage bags on the floor were clearly a problem.

Ahhh. Isn't that better?

Thank you, Aby, for a fun afternoon and for improving my quality of life!

If you’ve considered hiring an organizer but weren’t sure it was worth the investment, trust me, it is. Between the expertise, the company, and the focus the organizer provides, working with an organizer can feel miraculous. I can’t wait to do it again!

Testing out SHOTBOX, the tabletop photo light studio

10 February 2016

Last summer, I blogged about SHOTBOX, a tabletop photo light studio that was part of a Kickstarter campaign. I purchased one and it arrived in December, just when my puppy arrived. So I haven’t played with it as much as I’d like. But I’m impressed by it.

The photos from last week’s blog post on organizing my coloring supplies were taken using the SHOTBOX and the SideShot, the accessory that allows one to take nicely lit photos from the front.

Here are my initial impressions:

• The packaging was excellent. It arrived safe and sound from China with no damage at all.
• The instructions are good and hardly necessary because the product is simple and intuitive.
• The lighting is really bright (and it’s adjustable). Not only does the box light up, but the inside of the SideShot attachment lights up.
• I was able to get it up and running within minutes.
• The neoprene carrying case is excellent. All the components fit securely in the case and the stored SHOTBOX takes very little room to store. It comes with the Deluxe Bundle.
• I’m delighted that it comes with four different colored backdrops (white, black, green and blue), which are very easy to switch out.

Yesterday, I wanted to take a quick picture of a particular label on a box in my home for my genealogy blog and I was able to pull the SHOTBOX out of its case and take a quick picture. Before, I would have had a challenging time finding some decent light on an overcast day.

Here are some photos created by the SHOTBOX team that show the connectors and also how everything fits into the neoprene bag. They also provided the photo above. (I posted these and the ones below last week on my SHOTBOX review on my genealogy blog.)

Here’s a photo of my grandmother’s autograph book, given to me by my father in December. It’s taken from above.

Here’s a photo, taken from the front, of a small needle-felted replica of my departed poodle, Kirby. (It was created by Janet’s Needle Felting if you’re interested in having one of your own made.)

At $199 for the Deluxe Bundle (which includes the SHOTBOX, the SideShot, the backdrop kit, and the neoprene carrying case), I think this product is huge bargain. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that taking great photos is not one of my strengths. I’m hopeful that the SHOTBOX will mean that you’ll be seeing much better photos here!

Full disclosure: The SHOTBOX links above are affiliate links, which means that SHOTBOX gives me a percentage of the sale, but doesn’t affect the price. And it doesn’t affect my opinion of the product.

Organizing coloring supplies

1 February 2016

I jumped aboard the adult coloring book craze last June. I loved coloring as a kid and I love it now. It’s so wonderful that so many interesting types of coloring books are available. And the coloring supplies! When I was a kid, I used Crayola crayons. Now, I use pencils, pens, markers…it feels like the sky’s the limit.

As with many new hobbies, part of the fun is acquiring the supplies. I now feel like a kid in a candy shop in an art store, which is a new feeling. (I’m not particularly artistic.) But with the acquisition of supplies comes organizing challenges. I worked out a great organizing system for my colored pencils that I thought I’d share here. (I also color with colored Sharpies and I’m still working on a system for storing those.)

My first purchase was a single coloring book and a tin of 36 Prismacolor Premier colored pencils. Those were great—I loved the quality of the pencils and the blending I could do with them. They were contained, so all I had was a book and a tin, which I kept on the end table by the couch, along with a clipboard used while coloring a single page. Easy peasy.

But soon 36 colors wasn’t enough. So I went to locally owned Art Mart and bought more individual Prismacolor pencils. That’s when I started having a storage challenge. Then I bought more pencils and books (I asked for Art Mart gift cards for my birthday) and I had not only a storage challenge, but an organizing one. I love this kind of challenge!

Enter these lovely acrylic pencil trays from the Container Store. They’re high quality and hold two dozen pencils. I bought three. So I have space to store 72 pencils plus the 36 in the original tin.

So here’s how I worked it out. I sorted the pens by color category that made sense to me. In the acrylic trays I have:

• Reds
• Blues
• Neutrals

In my tin, I have three trays of 12. I’ve divided them into:

• Greens
• Purples
• Yellows

There’s a little overlap—some oranges could go in either the red or the yellow tray and some blue-purple pencils could go either way. Pinks go with the reds, but I put some with the purples. It’s all about how I think of them.

Here are some photos.

I store all the pencils in a Bigso Letter Box from the Container Store, along with my pencil sharpener and a box cutter for cutting pages out of a coloring book whose pages aren’t perforated. (I prefer to color a single page on a clipboard.)

See how nicely they fit?

(Incidentally, all these photos were taken using the SHOTBOX tabletop photo light studio.)

I used to store my coloring books in a second Bigso box, but after my friend Patti gave me six books for Christmas, my books outgrew the box. So I now keep them in magazine holders on a bookshelf in an adjacent room and keep my not-yet-organized collection of Sharpies in that second box, along with the current page I’m coloring on its clipboard. (I’ll post again when I figure out my Sharpies and other markers!)

The two boxes reside stacked on the end table, because I typically color while watching TV (though sometimes I color on the dining room table nearby). If we have visitors, it’s easy for me to move them out of the way.

If you’re a colorer, how do you store your supplies?

Worth repeating: Eliminating the extraneous

29 January 2016

My desk needs some serious help at the moment, probably because I’m spending too little time in my office these days. This weekend, I plan to focus on creating more visual peace in my office. I’m taking inspiration from this blog post, which I first posted on February 18, 2013. I’m so glad I signed up for Jen’s program and I wish she were still offering it!

I recently signed up for the fabulous Workspace and Studio Redesign program offered by Jen Hofmann of Inspired Home Office.

In the eight years since I last rearranged the furniture in my home office, I’ve spruced it up a couple of times (with the help of friends), but I’ve been feeling like I’d like to change it up a bit more. When I read about this program, I hopped on board.

Jen and I had our first session last week and she helped me realize that I have a lot of extraneous stuff in my office. While I had worked on clearing out and organizing the two closets in my office, I hadn’t done a thing about my desk, which was starting to close in on me. Stuff was there by default.

(Incidentally, I think one of the reasons I’ve been having trouble keeping up my clean desk habit is that so many things actually were residing on my desk that the clear space felt like it was shrinking.)

My assignment from Jen was to touch everything on my desk, as well as the stuff I can see while I’m working, and evaluate it based on the question, Does this represent who I am and where I’m going?

On Saturday, I got to work and it was absolutely liberating! I have a teak desk organizer that we bought in the early 90s. It’s been on various desks in the house, and on this desk in particular since at least 2001. I realized in talking with Jen that there were only about four things in it that I actually used on a regular basis.

So I took it off my desk. Now my desk contains only the essentials. I did keep a little decorative dish that contains sea glass I picked up on my trip to Barbados in November. And I added a felted-wool bowl I knit that at the moment contains my Valentine’s candy. Those two things make me happy.

Here’s a set of before and after photos.

Talk about more visual peace! As you can see, I also cleared off much of the stuff on the bulletin board above my desk, though I haven’t exactly artfully arranged it.

There will be more evolution (I have two more sessions with Jen), but I had just to share the progress I made in a just a couple of hours on Saturday.

It’s been amazingly easy to keep my desk clear since then. (I’m so motivated!) In the morning, my uncluttered desk greets me with open arms.