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Originally Posted by Crayfish
 The main key is almost always: Get rid of stuff. And then get rid of more stuff. And keep on getting rid of stuff.
There is no organizing strategy, no level of will power and self discipline and hard work, that will make a house with too much stuff into a tidy well-running home. As they say, "you can't organize clutter". It's not possible. You can spend years, decades, a lifetime trying to discipline yourself into having a tidy household with too much stuff, and you will never succeed. So, to reverse that, if you've spent years or decades trying to have a tidy household, and you've failed, it's almost certainly about having too much stuff. And, really, my next set of strategies are also about getting rid of stuff, because they're about empty space. It's not enough for everything to fit into the storage spaces that you have. You should also have: (1) "A place for everything", yep. And it should be a _storage_ place - for example, the kitchen and bathroom counters, tabletops, and so on, shouldn't be covered with stuff that's "on display". They should be almost entirely empty, with maybe one or two ornaments that are there truly because you want to look at them, _not_ because you pick them up and realize that you have nowhere to store them. The stuff should be stored in real storage structures, like shelves and drawers and closets and cabinets. And, sure, in the kitchen and bathroom there will be a small number of things - like the heavy stand mixer in the kitchen, and the electric toothbrush in the bathroom - that really are more convenient when they're out. But if "more convenient" is because it's hard to extract items from overpacked tangled drawers, the answer is not to leave it out, but to clean out the drawers. (2) space to spare - I'd say the everyday spaces should be no more than eighty percent full. This makes it easy to put stuff in, easy to get stuff out, and when you buy one new thing, you have a place to put it, because the storage designated for that category of stuff isn't full. Then you can take your time (though not too much time) to figure out what to declutter from that space to get it back to no more than eighty percent full. (3) Like stored with like. So don't stack two different sizes of plates on each other, and don't store socks _and_ panty hose _and_ costume jewelry in the same drawer, and so on. I recently stored some vases in front of the books on a bookshelf; this is a violation of my own rule, and I need to find a proper storage space for the bases. This strategy is intended to achieve: (4) One-handed retrieval and storage. Wherever possible, you should be able to get out, or put away, an item - a plate, a pair of socks, a book, whatever - with one hand. If you have to use two hands to carefully move a stack of cups to the counter so that you can tuck a cereal bowl behind them, and then put the stack of cups back, something's wrong. This kind of storage can be acceptable for rarely-used stuff like holiday decorations, but the stuff that you use more than once a month should, IMO, be one-hand-friendly. (Sure, maybe things like that heavy casserole can't be moved with one hand, but you should still be able to lay your hands on it and get it out without moving other stuff out of its way.) (5) Dropoff zones. You're not going to come home and take your purse to the shelf in the bedroom, open the mail and instantly file it, put away items in the bag from the drugstore and put the bag in the paper recycling, immediately after you close the door. Maybe you should, but you're not. No one is. You're going to dump all that stuff somewhere. So you need a designated place to dump it, so that it won't clutter up the couch or coffee table or some other functional place, while it's waiting for you to find a moment to put that stuff away. This could be an empty shelf, a bench that looks like it's for sitting but you know is for dumping purses and backpacks and bags - whatever you choose. And you'll probably need more than one of them around the house, so that you have one everywhere that you otherwise find yourself dropping things where they don't belong. I don't yet follow all of these rules all over the house, because I'm not done getting rid of enough stuff. But where I do, I find that they really do work. Crayfish |
