Day One Of The Clutter Chronicles: Getting A Handle On It
I'm going to get around to toilet training the cat soon, I swear...
My crusade against clutter begins! Over the last few days, I’ve been reading organizational advice on the internet. There is a LOT of it. Some of it is helpful, some not so much. (“There should be a place to put away every item.” Gee, you think?) I haven’t thrashed my way through all of it yet, but I’m realizing that I’m going to need some specialized solutions in addition to the general advice.
I own the same stuff that everyone owns. Clothes, pots and pans, glassware, random Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers, CDs and DVDs, and so on. I’m assuming that the same general advice that works for everyone will be just fine for dealing with this stuff. Then there are my own special clutter issues that the general rules don’t necessarily address. In the interests of dealing with everything effectively, I’m going to list them here:
Books. I own a trillion books. The only reason that statement is an exaggeration is because a trillion books have not yet been written and I couldn’t afford them if they had. I know perfectly well that if I asked any sane professional organizer what to do about this, they’d tell me to get rid of the books I wasn’t reading. I’m guessing most of said professionals would assume this would reduce the book supply a lot. Most professional organizers are probably not also compulsive readers. I read when eating breakfast, I read when eating lunch, I read when brushing my teeth, people. I do need to get rid of some of the books I’ll never read again, but I’m pretty sure this is still going to leave me at least one bookcase short of storage space. Purging is not really an option if I want to retain my sanity. I feel like there ought to be some efficient way of dealing with this other than getting a second bedroom to be my library, but I haven’t figured out what that would be.
Jewelry supplies. A lot of people probably have equivalent storage needs for some kind of hobby or side business — scrapbooking, knitting, woodworking, etc. Any of these pursuits create specialized storage needs for raw materials and the tools of the craft. My jewelry supplies part ways from scrapbooking paraphrenalia in that there’s a lot of equipment involved in addition to the raw materials. This stuff takes up room, and since some of it is toxic, has to be stored carefully (e.g. out of the cat’s reach). The raw materials are also expensive and extremely tempting to the cat, so it needs to be stored in a way that makes it easy for me to keep track of what I have and how much I’ve spent on it.
Old craft stuff. This includes a whole under-bed box full of half a crocheted afghan, three half-knitted sweaters, one three-quarters knitted scarf, one half-knitted hat, and miscellaneous cross-stitch equipment, plus a big box of origami papers. Most of this stuff is already out of sight, but realistically, I need to cope with some of it to make more storage room for the stuff that’s still out in the open. My initial impulse is to finish the scarf and the hat and pretend the rest of it doesn’t exist, but that is why I have this much stuff to begin with.
Jewelry. This isn’t really a major item, but the fact is that I own a lot of jewelry. A LOT. I own a large jewelry box (okay, two jewelry boxes), but they’re still not really organizing the jewelry as well as I’d like. I end up having to scour the boxes for the missing mates to earrings and having to spend a lot of time detangling the chains of warring necklaces. Since realistically, my jewelry collection is only going to get larger, it’d be nice to find a really effective way of storing it all.
Then there are the large, infrequently used things that I am really hesitant to throw away. The aerobed. The biggest of my suitcases. The other slipcover for my armchair. If I got rid of them, there’s every chance that I would end up having to replace them the next time I need them, but they take up so much room in the mean time. The rule of thumb I’m always hearing is that if you haven’t used something in a year, get rid of it. Well, yes. That’s not a bad rule. The thing is, just because I haven’t been able to take a major trip in the last year doesn’t mean that I’m never going to take one again. I’m torn.
So, these are the things I’m going to have to figure out as I go along. Next up, some of the saner-sounding organizational tips out there, and my first efforts to implement them.
