Getting the clutter out? Now, keep it out!

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May 14, 2013

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Got the clutter out or working on it? Here’s how to keep it out! Over and over again, I see the ‘Three Biggies’ really challenge some of the most organized people. Control these three, and you’ll go from ‘getting organized’ to BEING organized!

Incoming Stuff

Really look at your purchasing habits. One client told me she frequently pretended that I was the ‘angel on her shoulder’ while in stores, asking her these questions:

  • Do you really NEED that item?
  • Is there a specific place in your home for that item?
  • Would buying that item help you toward your goal?

Incoming Paper

  • How many of those magazine subscriptions do you have? If it takes you about an hour to read a magazine and you have 6 subscriptions, do you really have 6 hours per month to devote solely to reading those magazines? Keep only those you truly love AND read, cancel the rest.
  • Take back control of your mailbox. Sign up for Catalog Choice, PaperKarma, or another of the online services to get off of mailing lists.
  • Keep a recycling bin or trashcan just inside your garage. Sort your mail each day while standing over the bin. Junk mail doesn’t even get a chance to clutter up your house!

Kids’ Schoolwork

  • Go through your kids’ graded papers each week. Get your kids involved to decide what is kept and what is recycled.
  • At the end of each school year, celebrate by sorting through what was kept and keep only the ‘best of the best’ for each kid’s memento bin.

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Clean up your room, young lady!

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May 10, 2013

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Calm organized bedroom

Today, May 10, is Clean Up Your Room Day. If we’re parents, we often tell our kids this, but when is the last time you really looked at your own bedroom?

Here a few quick and painless steps to help turn your bedroom into an oasis of calm. Goodness knows we need it!

  • Clear the floor! Shoes go back into the closet, toss dirty laundry into the hamper, books and magazines find a home on a bookshelf or nightstand.
  • We’re a ‘no kids in the master bedroom’ home, but if you’re not, return any toys and kid stuff to the kids’ rooms.
  • Give your nightstands some love. They really should only hold what you need at bedtime – whatever you’re currently reading, your alarm, hand lotion, tissues. These you can keep in a compartmentalized drawer or in a nice basket.
  • If possible, clear anything out of the room that might disrupt a sense of relaxation and calm. For example, feng shui experts say to keep anything work or financially related out of the bedroom.
  • Add something green and alive! Even something as simple as an aloe plant or lucky bamboo will help clean the air and add a sense of calm.
  • Lastly, fresh clean sheets and a vacuum. Even if you have no time for anything else, a freshly made bed and a quick vacuum will make the room look and feel cleaner and fresher!

 

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Chaos to Collected: 5 Steps to Regaining Control of your Kid’s Mementos

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May 7, 2013

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Almost every parent I know is at wit’s end trying to come up with a way to control, curb, and collect their kid’s neverending stream of schoolwork, artwork, craft projects. Regain control! Here are 5 easy steps.

  1. Get your kids involved. I love that the client’s kids I work with have very specific ideas of what they like, want to keep, and what they treasure.
  2. Keep the best of the best. Your child will not require intensive therapy when she discovers you didn’t keep every single finger-painting and every single pasta necklace from preschool. I promise!
  3. Leave room for growth – look for a storage system that has enough room for the rest of their time at home. Expandable files are great for schoolwork, as you can assign one tab for each grade.
  4. Label it and be specific enough that you can easily tell what’s in the container without having to look through it. You can do this by age range, grade range, however it makes sense to you.
  5. Store it in a SAFE place! So many clients have been saddened to find precious family mementos destroyed by lack of care in storage. Photos melt in heat, plastic dries out, yellows, and warps, clothing mildews and mold. Your attic and non-climate controlled basement are the worst places for most items.
Courtesy: BEK, The New Yorker

Courtesy: BEK, The New Yorker

Memento Storage Rule: If it’s worth saving, it’s worth taking the time to preserve and store it safely.

 

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Before & After: What a difference a day makes…

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April 29, 2013

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Which closet would YOU rather shop from every morning? This one…

disorganized closet, cheap hangers, cluttered closet

Um, yeah….

 

Or this one?

organized closet

Muuuuch better, huh?

Yeah. I wanted to do this post to illustrate a point: even small, quick changes make for big improvements. In this project, I did NO purging. The only two things I did was to…

#1: quickly categorize the hanging clothes by type (sleeveless tops, short sleeved, 3/4, long-sleeved, etc), then pants, then sweaters, jackets, then dresses.

#2: A hanger switch: With the exception of heavier jackets, I changed out the hangers from a mass of drycleaning, plastic, and varied ones to a uniform, slimline, flocked hanger.

No more standing in the closet staring at the mess, wondering where anything is. Organization isn’t just about bins and labels. It IS about creating a system that saves you time, stress, and money.

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Before & After: Buckhead Playroom

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April 25, 2013

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This was of my favorite playroom projects, for many reasons. Lots of toy variety, great client, fantastic results!

Here’s the ‘Before’ picture…

Too cluttered to play in!

Too cluttered to play in!

As you can see, extra furniture, tons of books, clutter covering the coffee table, and the right wall was stacked about waist-high with boxes, bags, and bins of toys. My client was overwhelmed and saddened to realize that the room was so cluttered her kids had stopped playing there!

We spent a couple of sessions sorting all of the toys by category and purging all of the outgrown toys, broken toys, and toys and games with missing pieces. The result: 9 large contractor bags filled with toys that could be donated, plus 3 bags of trash. Talk about a weight of her shoulders, right?

With the sorting and purging complete, we talked about her kids’ styles of playing. Combining that knowledge with her budget and aesthetic needs, we identified the best system – IKEA Expedit storage units with black cloth bins. We made sure to label each shelf so the kids could identify what is kept in each bin.

Video games and board games found a home within the built-in cabinetry, and the books were winnowed down a bit, too.

What do you think?

Lots of room for playing and fun!

Lots of room for playing and fun!

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Thoughts on Boston…

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April 19, 2013

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As I write this, the Boston Police Department, with federal support, are going house to house, searching for the second suspect in this week’s terror attacks. As with all of these events, we are shocked, frightened, saddened.

Watching the news on the treadmill this morning, I was watching CNN interview a young couple who’d been evacuated by police during the search process. Given no more than 2-3 minutes, they were asked to leave their home, dog and baby in arms, with no idea of how long they would be gone.  I immediately thought of what I would grab: my loved ones obviously, my laptop and phone since they are key tools in making my living. My old and sickly, but beloved, cat Booger. Everything else can be replaced.

I can’t help looking around our home and being so appreciative of what we have. But the things that really matter in my home aren’t bought from Pottery Barn, or Fab’rik, or Container Store. I’m betting you feel the same way.

Hold your loved ones close.

UsatStevesBdayAgain3.5.10

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REVIEW: Ampad Shot Note, by Pendaflex

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April 2, 2013

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The concept behind Pendaflex’s Shot Note is the ability to take your notes from ‘handwritten to handheld’. The product uses note and sketch pads with special corner markers which, used with their phone app, creates digitized notes that you can share – via email, Twitter, Evernote, and Dropbox.

Three styles of the Pendaflex Shot Note pads

Three styles of the Pendaflex Shot Note pads

For this review, I used notes from client sessions as well as personal planning notes.

Step 1: Download the Shot Note app from the iPhone App store. (Note: The app is not available for the Android market. Maybe down the road?)

Step 1: Digitizing the notes was as easy as, well, taking a photo using your iPhone. Just use the corner markers to make sure your notepad is lined up, and done!

Step 2: You can then name the new file and assign tags.

Step 3: You can save the image to your Camera Roll, email it, tweet it, or export it to Evernote or Dropbox.

All of those steps worked very smoothly, and the app is very user-friendly from the start. But here’s the thing: you don’t need the specially-marked notepads! Any legal pad, planner, or sticky note will do.

The bad news: Shot Note isn’t new technology, and it isn’t solving a problem that hasn’t already been solved. And the product that’s being sold (the note and sketch pads) aren’t needed to use the free app. Anyone who can take a decent cell phone photo can use this without buying the special pads. And like I said, the app is only available for the iPhone market. No Android presence.

The good news: Even if you have no desire to use Evernote, Dropbox,  or Twitter, the Shot Note app has value in digitizing notes of any kind and turning them into a taggable and searchable format. That alone makes it handy for referring to meeting notes, grocery lists, your kids’ lacrosse game schedule, etc.

Disclaimer: I was provided the note and sketch pads from Pendaflex to facilitate this review. My review is my honest opinion based on my actual experience with the product.

 

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The Beauty of Adding Structure into your Day!

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March 26, 2013

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woman working at kitchen table

‘I used to be really good at keeping stuff organized!’

‘Why could I juggle tasks when I worked but not now when I stay at home?!’

‘I have a ton of time, why can’t I do this on my own?!’

 

Sound familiar? I hear these sentiments pretty frequently from clients, most of the time from those who are retired or who are stay-at-home parents of school-aged kids, and I realized these clients all had something in common – no external structure or accountability. They and they alone, are responsible for their daily schedule.

Structure is inherent in most work environments. People rely on you to respond in a timely manner, turn in projects on time and on budget, show up to meetings ready and on time.  But how about once you retire? Or you’re a stay-at-home parent?

We all have those days where we feel crazy busy, but when we collapse at the end of the day, we wonder what we accomplished. Right?

For those like I’ve mentioned, building some of your own structure into your day can make a huge difference in how you manage your time AND how you accomplish what you need to. The clients I mentioned have responded with rave reviews about what goals they’ve been able to meet once they’ve wrapped some structure into their day and held themselves accountable! Those excited emails are the ones that make an organizer’s heart sing!

If you look at most housekeeping advice from generations ago, most housewives had a schedule. Monday: Laundry. Tuesday: Ironing, Wednesday: Clean the floors. Etc. By the end of each week, each task was completed!

Start, as always, with something small. Commit to having the kitchen cleaned up by 9am each morning. Or errands completed by 12noon. Set ONE goal, meet it every for a week. Then add another small goal. Repeat.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how adding structure into your day can reap huge rewards!

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We gotta talk about your garage…

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March 14, 2013

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Because of what I do for a living, I spend quite a bit of time driving through a wide variety of neighborhoods. In almost every one,  I always see  houses where the cars are parked in the driveway, and in many instances, you can see through the garage windows, and you know why the cars are outside. Clutter! The cars literally can’t fit inside the garage!

garage, organize garage, declutter garage

This look familiar?

The negative effects of this are several:

-          Parking your car outside can take a toll on its paint job, which can look pretty bad and reduce the trade-in or resale value of your car.

-          If parking in your driveway is against the rules of your homeowners’ association, you can start receiving warning letters and fines.

One more big reason? Let’s say you’re paying a $1500/month mortgage on a 2500 square foot house. With the average two-car garage being 500 square feet, you’re paying $3600 per year – just in storage!

That’s $300 a month – for storing stuff that you put in the garage because you don’t really use it!

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It’s all about YOU!

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March 7, 2013

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Hello all! I have lots of ideas on how to make Clutterninja’s online presence, but I want to hear from YOU! Would you like to see more product reviews, more stories from clients, more posts on specific organizing challenges? I want to know!

Vote on our Facebook page!

https://www.facebook.com/Clutterninja

 

 

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