I've always considered myself a very organized person. I am good at pinning organizing ideas on Pinterest, and when the strange "let's organize the entire house" voodoo hits I follow it with a passion.
Lately though, I realize those pins are rarely followed and I am always rushing around searching in drawers and cupboards for everything with only my gut and faulty memory reminding me where things are.
Today it was Ron's deodorant (not found), yesterday it was the blender, and our marriage license is still missing in piles of paperwork. So yeah...I am not organized after all.
My biggest issue is stuffing things. When I get in the tidying mode I seem to find the nearest drawer to put everything in thinking I will get to it later and put it in the right place, without even knowing where the right place is. And when the housecleaners come twice a month to scrub the bathrooms and mop the floors, I go crazy stuffing every little thing in the nearest hide-y place.
This year Ronald and I have been on a mission. My depression has fucked up much of our life and one thing it did the last several years was cause me to buy every little thing imaginable. Once our two spare rooms were half-hoarded I finally realized how not-like-me and not-like-how-I-want-to-be my behavior had become. So it has been stopped and R and I are "digging out".
We have donated loads and loads to the local thrift store, and still have more to get rid of. In this process we are also working on setting up a new way of organizing. Thing is, I haven't started that yet or even figured out how I want things to function. So I'm going back to stuffing...I don't know what to do with something "Uhm...put it in the spare room". Bad habit. Bad. Bad. Bad.
Setting up a new organizing system for the whole house is really freaking daunting. It's not like I have a single drawer to organize, no, it's 1400 square feet! We have a lot of storage space, which is amazing, so I need to get to it.
My get organized for real ideas so far:
Keep an inbox in the entryway for mail or any paperwork and clean it out once a week
Keep a put away bin in the entry for anything that needs to be moved to other rooms and empty it daily
Use a box for "holy shit the house cleaners are coming in the morning" stuff and empty the box as soon as the cleaners leave
Put groceries and toiletries away as soon as I get home
Label and designate areas for toiletries, meds, paperwork, etc. Even if those areas aren't organized yet, I will have a general idea of where to look
---
Are you super organized or more like me? Do you have any organizing advice or things that work for you?
I will keep you updated...
xoxoxox, C
Those are good ideas. Not too "ambitious", doable, and not overwhelming. Getting organized is difficult. I've watched my mom struggle with it my entire life… and the overwhelming messiness of my upbringing caused me to kind of swing in the other direction and be rather tidy. I'm not an extremist, by any stretch of the imagination… living out of my car for several years really helped me to pare down possessions and learn how to say "no" to buying more things. Being poor really helps with that, too lol! Now, when I have things that I don't really want (gifts or such that come into my possession), I keep them in a box (or boxes, as the case may be) and re-gift them. I *love* to give gifts, so it's a perfect solution for a financially challenged person such as myself to be able to indulge my passion of giving gifts while keeping my house less cluttered and not having to spend much money.
ReplyDelete