Evaluate, Eliminate and Integrate: A Home Office

When the kids lived at home, this L-shaped desk area served its purpose. It was the perfect place for them to do homework and play computer games. But with them gone it became the catch-all corner. In this photo it is serving as a sorting area for an upcoming yard sale.

The yard sale prompted the owner to evaluate how the space was used. She eliminated the left desk and integrated the things she wanted to keep. With the desk removed - and when the neatly stacked items awaiting the yard sale are gone - this room will have a lot more floor space, perfect for when the adult kids come to visit.

Finishing What She Started

Remember the craft room we were cleaning out? It looked like this:

When I went back to help again it looked like this:

This is one of the many things I love about rePurpose - once I get someone started they invariably get on a roll and complete the job themselves. You get in a rhythm evaluating, eliminating and integrating and you just keep going.

She went from this...

...to this:

She was able to let go of some craft supplies she is no longer interested in, made plans to complete a few projects and got inspired to try some new ones now that she has a bit of space to stretch out in.

Nothing makes me happier than inspiring someone to take control of their environment. My work here is done.

Corner to Corner Craft Room Clean-up

A few days ago we finished the first corner of this room. The edge of the clean and neat bookshelf can be seen on the far right. Now we are moving around the room counter clockwise.

The next thing to tackle is this cute hutch. It sits in front of the window and blocks the light and, along with the printer table, takes up space that could be used for relaxing or for guest seating. The owner has decided that the best thing is to remove it altogether so we need to relocate or discard all it holds.

We did it! She consolidated the jewelry displays with others on the first bookcase, tossed a bunch of stuff and identified an entire stack of hardback craft and decorating books she can sell. Now the hutch is ready for sale, too. Someone is going to love it.

Next: remove the printer table.

We made space for the printer on the desk and wound up with more light from the unblocked window and room for a bench she already owned. It is great spot to TEMPORARILY stack items to take to classes and to read a book to her grandkids.

We have  conquered the northeast corner!  Total time: one hour.

Next up: the northwest corner desk. Stay tuned.

Craft Corner Clean-up

Oooh this challenge is really FUN!  This woman has her own craft room filled with lots of fun.. and lots of goodies that she needs to sort, purge and organize:

She does everything: sewing, scrap booking, jewelry making, paper crafting, flower arranging, wedding planning, you name it. She sells her work and even sells supplies to other crafters. But her sweet little studio was overflowing and she needed to get it under control. Her goal was to create some open space to work on her projects and to have easy access to the supplies and materials she sells.

Our strategy was to tackle it in manageable chunks. So we started with the top half of this corner bookshelf:

It is amazing what a bookshelf can hold. We discarded these piles of recycling, donations, yard sale items - plus another box of things to return to family members.

Then we had the pleasure of emptying another shelf in her bedroom of the supplies it held and moving it here:

Wow. Look at the difference! Room to breathe! Total time: 2 hours.

Stay tuned for solutions for the rest of her sweet craft room.

Digging Out the Paper Piles

If you are like most people I bet you have a least one stack of papers waiting to be dealt with. This client had several with sentimental family papers she gathered over the years.

She tackled a pile, sorted them and surprised relatives with a package of memories selected just for them.

rePURPOSING Things: Mints Tins Hold iStuff

If you like green tea buy these mints at Trader Joes and then keep the tin.

The label peels off easily leaving no residue and making the perfect size, see-through, stackable storage container for earbuds, usb and firewire cables. Tuck them in a drawer and easily retrieve the correct connections with no tangles and no mistakes. Antioxidants for your clutter!

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.

Office Closet Overhaul

This client is very lucky to have a large closet outfitted with shelves and drawers in her home office. She had so much space that she never tossed anything; she just kept loading up the shelves. Consequently, she lost track of what she had in there and was storing things that she no longer needed. The surplus was spilling out on the floor blocking her access to some of the shelves.

We started by evaluating, eliminating and integrating her books, putting like with like.  We shelved the travel books together, the special interest books together and the novels together. By the time we were done we had boxed and bagged tk# of books to donate.

Next we tackled the binders and papers from her many projects, presentations and conferences. After emptying and saving the best binders for future use, we filled her entire  tk recycling bin with outdated reports, research papers  and brochures. In the process we found numerous conference tote bags to donate.

Then we clustered the electronics, office supplies and current projects and found she had ample space to hide items from the rest of her office in the closet. But now it looks so good it is a shame to close the doors!

rePURPOSING Things: Single Earrings

If after organizing your jewelry box you are left with single post earrings, rePURPOSE them into pretty push pins. They will be a subtle, unexpected eye treat in your kitchen or home office.

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.

Ready to be Ruthless: Rosemarie’s Home Office

After her children grew up and moved out, Rosemarie started spreading her things around the house. One child’s room eventually morphed into a home office with no real planning or thought. She moved in a desk. Then some shelves and a file cabinet. But nothing moved out. The kid’s bed stayed along with the possessions they didn’t take into their grown-up life: stuffed animals, sports equipment, prom dresses, school papers.

Rosemarie wanted her office to function better.  And she wanted the bed to stay so her kids could stay over occasionally.

She had all the ingredients to make this room into a pretty terrific work space: storage, desk, bookcases, file cabinet, privacy, even an inspiring garden view. But there was just too much stuff in the room and the furniture placement was unattractive and inefficient.

Rosemarie is a college professor so, in addition to her own kids’ school papers, she had her students’ as well. She is also a voracious reader and had the books to prove it. A large file cabinet, topped with books, was in an awkward place at the head of the bed. It was basically inaccessible so she piled her papers in stacks and boxes around the room. Her many files even hid the glorious view of the garden. The sleeping space, crammed between the file cabinet and a bookcase, had binders and materials from conferences and classes stacked around it. It was not a serene place to nap.

Our strategy was to clear enough space to move the furniture into a more efficient configuration and visually separate the office space from the sleeping space.

Rosemarie was ready to be ruthless. In a few short hours we filled:

·      a large commercial-sized paper recycling bin

·      her car trunk with books for resale or donation

·      several boxes for good will

·      several more boxes of things to be returned or given to friends

This cleanse led Rosemarie to a flash of insight as to why she was buried under papers. One of her first jobs involved endless hours of boring filing that she swore she’d never do again. Once she sees that a quick pass at daily filing will give her access to any paper she needs plus a serene workspace, I think she will overcome her filing aversion.

After the “psychoanalysis session”, we moved her desk under the garden-view window, positioned the file cabinet so she could actually open the drawers and cleared the area around the bed.

We stuffed her kids’ possessions in the large closet and shut the sliding doors. Her next project is to get the kids home to haul it away. Then she’ll have more room to store the boxes she didn’t get around to filing.

RePURPOSING Spaces: Our Bedroom

Living in a small house has been a large lesson in seeing ways to use space beyond the obvious.

Here is a photo of the first time we saw the Front Bedroom as potential home-buyers:

It is exactly the same size as the Back Bedroom and the bathroom is directly between the two but this one must have been designated the "Master Bedroom" because it had the largest closet. So, influenced by the home staging and without questioning the room functions, we moved in and set up our bed.

The house had minimal closet space so we added IKEA wardrobes and used the Back Bedroom as a home office.

Then one day it hit me. Why were we sleeping in the sunniest room in the house and spending waking hours in the darkest room? Wouldn’t it make sense to switch? But we'd have a lot less closet space because the sunny room had a picture window and, therefore, less wall space for the wardrobes. They would have to go. Could we live with less clothes?

Like most people, we wore 20% of our clothes 80% of the time. After deciding we’d rather have a sunny spot to work rather than clothes we rarely wore, we whittled down our wardrobes. Most of my husband’s everyday clothes were folded and put in a dresser. He selected his favorite shirts, sports jackets, ties and belts to hang in his 29" Back Bedroom closet.

I did the same in the Front Bedroom closet with mine. To save space, we stored seasonal clothes in protective bags under our bed.

Without the wardrobes we had space for a guest sofa bed in the Front Bedroom. So now we have a bright, sunny place to read, do projects or use the computer and our guests have some privacy.

Plus we sleep much better in the darker Back Bedroom, our romantically cozy "new" Master Bedroom.

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.