So now, are you an organized person? I am but I don’t have time to maintain it. HA! Everything I see goes through this 5-second makeover in my brain and then I dismiss it and move on. Well, most of the time I can dismiss it, but some things just NEED to be organized and I can’t let it go.
I like to organize shelves, paperwork, finances, pantries, clothes, closets, drawers, cleaning supplies, music, oh the list is endless. I don’t like to make beds. Isn’t that funny? I can avoid making the bed well into the morning but can’t overlook the laundry supplies not being in orderly fashion.
Clutter is a serious enemy of mine. I hate clutter. I would shove it all into a closet and under furniture but then I know it’s there so that bugs me and I have to drag it all back out. So I’ve learned to understand this side of me. I’m an organized person. I don’t go on trips without having everything organized. I don’t go grocery shopping without a plan. So why am I looking at a stack of papers beside my computer as I type this? Oh, nevermind. I’ll organize them in a minute; this is way more fun.
I blame my mom. She always said that everything has a place. That did not always filter into action in our home when I was growing up but it did get said a lot. My mom raised 4 kids alone in a 2-bedroom house, and we were very poor, so times were tough. She was and still is a very strong woman and from her, one of the life lessons I have learned is that we always keep going no matter what.
Anyway, four kids in an itty-bitty house with little money meant there was clutter. And sometimes, not much money for anything but bleach. So we cleaned mostly with bleach. We bleached everything: the counters, the floors, the walls, the furniture, the clothes. But bleach could not do anything about the clutter. I would dream of getting extra money to put up shelves or to build a little storage house in the back yard for stuff to go into.
I had a happy childhood, don’t get me wrong. Just difficult. But I treasure the life lessons I learned from growing up in tough times. So, back to clutter. I have wondered if maybe the reason I detest clutter so much now is that it reminds me of poverty or something? It just feels ugly to have clutter everywhere. I will pick up things from the floor before loading the dishwasher. Just don’t like clutter.
Fortunately, I love crafts. So, even as a child and teenager, I would come up with ideas to hide clutter. We didn’t have any extra space to put the stuff, but I would try to think of ways to make it look better. Like putting construction paper around cereal boxes and oatmeal boxes and then, storing things in them. Or putting paper around our toy box. Our toy box was a box. It was a cardboard box that would get replaced with another cardboard box when that one got worn. So covering it with paper and drawing on the paper made it look more fun.
Anyway, I’ve grown up and never gotten over my dislike of clutter. So I love finding new ideas on organization, even if I don’t have anything that needs to be organized at the moment (that never happens). I am immediately drawn to magazines that have a blurb about organizational tips on the cover. I cannot resist an email that mentions something about ‘how to get organized.’ I have a ton of tips and have tried lots of them, but really – there’s no way to try them all because I would never get anything done. I would have to organize my organizational tips.
But that doesn’t mean that I can’t hand them off to my readers. I’ll give you the ones I’ve tried and liked, ones I still use, those I tried and didn’t like, ones I didn’t like but you might like, ones that I haven’t gotten to yet but want to try. I’ll just give them all to you and you can run with it. What fun!
Some of the things I plan to cover are:
Getting the most out of small spaces
Storage areas you hadn’t thought of yet
Pretty organizing tips
Using crafts to organize
Teaching kids how to organize
Containers and more
Go vertical!
Camouflaging clutter
… and more!
This is going to be a fun series. I will post weekly into the Organization Section and will eventually come up with really clever names for all my sections as soon as I organize them.
Looking forward to working with you!
Connie
