Closet Clean-out

This client is anticipating downsizing in the next few years so I suggested that she do a little work now to avoid a ton of work later. I began by asking where she stashed things that she hadn't retrieved in the last year.
The hiding place was her guest room closet.

For the time being she felt confident that she did not have excess clothing but that middle shelf above proved she did have excess books and magazines. She didn't even remember what was stored here so we surveyed the shelves and found that her biggest space hog was out-of-date travel guides.

We began by removing and evaluating everything.

We eliminated the majority by packing boxes of books for a library sale, tearing and filing pages from magazines with articles she wanted to keep and filling over half a 96 gallon recycling bin (!) with the rest.

We integrated what was left by shelving the remaining books she wanted to read where she could see them - on an open bookcase in her office. We now had room to get her sewing machine off the floor where it might get kicked. What remained were cleaning supplies specific to that area of the house and some books for overnight guests so we put them back on the shelves. My next step would be to store the linens for the guest bed on the freed-up shelving.

Total time: one hour.

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.

Discovering the Desk

No one in this family used this dusty desk. It was covered with faded photos and obsolete computer accessories. We began our full office clean up here. The client was so inspired she went on to finish the room, letting go of outdated projects that would not be completed, purging and re-vamping her filing system and taking an entire box of cables and connections to eWaste recycling.

Now she has an inviting space to work and write.

Aline’s Home Office- File Cabinets, Part I

I love file cabinets. I don’t know how people live without them. When my youngest daughter turned twelve she surprisingly requested a file cabinet for her birthday. I guess she saw me use mine all the time, it looked liked fun and she wanted one, too. It IS fun. The flat file is one of the greatest inventions ever. Every paper has a place and you can always find what you want but ONLY IF YOU FILE IT.

File cabinets play a central role in Aline’s home. She has plenty of them but she doesn’t fully exploit their usefulness. She needs to get papers off her horizontal surfaces - the floor, tables, book shelves – and into her file cabinets.

To make it worse, years ago her partner boxed up a lot of these piles of papers to make room for a new floor installation. Then boxes sat there, for years, being an eyesore and taking up floor space. She didn’t even know what papers were in them.

Her priority with my time was finding a document she suspected was in one of the boxes, so we started our paper purge there. I worked as a coach, encouraging her to divest herself of random papers we came across during the search.

We sorted the papers and other items into boxes for:

Shredding

Recycling

Returning

Filing

Yard sale

And a special box of ephemera from her religious movement to send to a library for their archives.

She got into a paper tossing rhythm but she couldn’t bring herself to part with the folders and binders we emptied. Her instinct was keep them and other office supplies to be reused. My belief is the less you keep, the less likely you are to fill them up. She agree to keep only a few.

When we finished for the day we had found the missing document. But more impressive, we reduced 18 boxes to five - two to file, two with small papers and photos that remained to be sorted and one with papers to shred.

This was the first step in reclaiming space in the office she and her partner share. She has a lot of next steps ahead of her and most of them involve file cabinets:

1. She needs to clear outdated papers from her file cabinets so she has space to file the papers she wants to keep.

2. Once their contents are reduced she should move her file cabinets to arrange “like with like.” A black file cabinet in the living room could join the matching one in the office. Placed side by side they would create a larger horizontal surface. If she moves her two three-drawer file cabinets next to each other under her printer shelf, they will create a larger horizontal space where she could store printing supplies.  If she can reduce the need for so many file cabinets, it will reduce the furniture in her small condo, which will expand her space.

3.  Then she can clear off her desk because she’ll have places to file current papers.

4. Her last step is to take everything off her bookshelves, clean them and re-shelve only the books she will actually read again or use for reference.

We’ll check in later on her progress.