Bedrooms are for Sleeping

What do you see when you look at the corner of this bedroom? The simple, serene statue on the shelf?  Or the messy, massive piles of papers on the chair? It is too bad as the chair by the big sunny window would make a sweet spot to stop and contemplate, or maybe read one of the magazines in this photo. But there are just TOO MANY magazines to digest and the clutter invades what should be a room for rest and rejuvenation.

In about 90 minutes the client and I sorted these papers, cleared the chair and moved the matching pillows to their proper place. But this progress is only temporary if she doesn't have a long-term, workable plan to manage her papers.

This generous, nurturing woman saves catalogues for potential gift purchases and hangs on to magazines with recipes, decorating ideas and articles to send to family and friends. My bet is that she will not ignore her impulse to save what she reads and share it with her friends in the name of clutter control. So what she needs is a way to store it until she has time to send it and a way to retrieve it once that time has come.

Her best bet is to tear out the relevant pages, write the date on them and file them by category: cook, mail, buy, decor. Then once a week she can open the files and in about one half hour: order the things she wants to buy, make a grocery list for recipes she wants to try, mail the articles she wants to send and move the best decorating ideas to a more permanent folder.

Then she can relax on her paper-free chair, look at her statue and enjoy her distraction-free bedroom.