Tag Archives: home organizing

In Praise of the Junk Drawer

What a mess! You look into the drawers of your desk or craft area, and what do you find? It’s a mess, but it’s a creative mess. At this time of the year, when we’re inside more often than out, how can you use your junk to spawn creativity in your home? Look in your workshop, or in the place where you put bits and pieces like nails and string. Don’t have a place like this? Make one, even if it’s just one little drawer. Your grandparents probably found this to be the most useful drawer in the house. We … Continue reading →

Maximize Space in a Small Home

Yesterday I talked about maximizing space in your small garden. If your home is also tiny, you’ll want to keep things neat and organized in there too. But how can you do this if you just don’t have the space? Minimize, minimize. Yes, a small home needs to have less stuff. Evaluate what you really use, and give extra things to charity. Share stuff. Do you really need to own the things that you own? Can you rent them sometimes, or share with a friend who has more space? If some of your objects take up space and aren’t all … Continue reading →

What’s in Your Preschooler’s Art Cabinet?

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Officially, we have an art cabinet. Unofficially, our art cabinet is a three-tier shelf that sits in the corner of our recreation room downstairs and has baskets on it. Each basket is stuffed with an unfortunate array of bits and pieces at the moment, haphazardly stuffed into the corners of the basket. Let me say that I am not always a paragon of organization and leave it at that. However, despite its not-so-lovely appearances, our preschool art cabinet is well-stocked. This is the time of year to take a look at your art supplies, plan for the summer, and re-evaluate … Continue reading →

Hanging a Picture

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I wanted to share my newfound knowledge with you. It’s nothing profound, really, but it is rather useful. What is this knowledge of which I speak? Well, it’s how to hang things from your walls and ceilings. Now, we live in a townhouse that has metal studs. This might not seem like a problem, but it has stymied us for years. You can get stud finders that will find your wooden studs when you run them across a wall – they beep. Then you can insert screws directly into the drywall at that location and it makes it simple to … Continue reading →

The Decluttering Rules: Useless Furniture

Come on, you know you have it. I know I do. That piece of furniture that has been sitting in the living room, full of stuff from years gone by. Or perhaps it’s housing a single television and a few other items that could easily be stored elsewhere. It’s the scourge of the useless furniture. My house is full of useless furniture. Some of it has sentimental value, like my grandmother’s rolltop desk and her hope chest. This I will keep, because it has a lot of value to me. Most of our furniture has been gleaned from free sources, … Continue reading →

The Decluttering Rules

Yesterday evening I looked into my daughter’s room, only to see a grand mess. It wasn’t that the room was really very messy, but there were little scraps of craft materials everywhere, dolls and stuffed animals piled high, and various doodads on the counters. There was an aura of general disorder, and I can’t stand an aura of general disorder. I’m not a packrat or a clutter person. Visual clutter can be comforting if it feels organized, but I still find it oppressive after a time. I feel a deep need to declutter, to shift things into places where they … Continue reading →

I Helped

Toddlers love to help. When my daughter was a toddler, she could spend a lot of time washing a single pot in her efforts to help in the kitchen, or perhaps she would slice one banana. These were relatively token gestures on my part, but since she took such pleasure in helping I wanted to give her some opportunities to get involved in whatever I was doing. Preschoolers often have slightly more advanced notions of helping. They’ve wised up a little to the unnecessary helping that you might occasionally give a toddler. They want to make a real contribution, yet … Continue reading →