Finding Harmony: The Organized Life

I cannot believe how quickly time goes by. I thought I hadn't posted in a few days, but it has been almost four weeks. Between spending the day with my daughter and alternating the evenings teaching classes and working, it certainly goes by fast.

Alright... update since I last posted:

I've donated more books, finished enough restorative work on the master bathroom to get it in useable shape, and have done a ton of general cleaning.

I continue to gather things together in one place for a spring garage sale. My neighborhood has a huge garage sale the first Saturday in May.

I'll continue to post projects as I complete them.

Socks are perhaps the most ridiculously difficult part of organizing a home laundry system. Perhaps even more ridiculous if you own alot of dress clothes like I do. I have so many variations of black socks I can rarely match them up.

While my wife and I sorted laundry furiously last night (why furiously? We've got a two month old. If we drop the ball on a project, we might not get back to it for another two months!) I noticed that I had so many socks that I couldn't find matches to. Over the last couple weeks as I've become mroe aggessive about organizing, I've been fixing all the little things that annoy me.

I remembered an article on lifehacker.com about simplying your sock collection. I went through the assorted socks and threw every sock that had no mate into the rag bin, then went through and threw out some pairs that I wearly wore or got so annoyed at searching for the mate when I did wear them that it didn't make them worth owning.

It seems ridiculously simple to sort through your socks, but its one of those tasks that we just ignore and stay annoyed with. Some of those socks had been mateless for years!

I am J, Slayer of Way Laid Socks.

My mini projects for the day involved some time saving ideas and organizing the master bath.

The first change was to put a trash can/bin everywhere trash is generated. Prior to this change there was a trash can in only 2 out of the 3 bathrooms and those two trash cans were frequently stolen to put into the master bedroom and the study when they were needed. This led to a "Well that's where the trash can usually goes, I'll throw it there until I put the can back" mentality. As you can imagine the bathroom corner would pile up with tissues and such. I dug around in the attic and found some sturdy baskets, lined them with plastic and put them in the study and the bedroom. The two hard plastic cans were returned to the bathroom.

Since I finished the tile work in the master bath a few days ago, it was time today to really give it a good cleaning. I even scrubbed the lil weird ring of soap crust off the base of the faucet. While in the process digging through all our toiletries and ditching the stuff we never use anymore. I ended up throwing out 10 pounds of products we never use.

When my wife was 8 months pregnant I started a remodeling project in the bathroom. Somewhere between 9 months pregant and the present the job never got finished. All that remained was the second coat of grout and adhering the baseboard tiles. Time became a very precious commodity however and a very lonely grout float sat in my bathroom for three months.

I made up for all the neglect, and the float has forgiven me! I finished the tile job this afternoon when I returned from the used bookstore. I'll seal it tomorrow and be done with it.

The tools are back in my workshop, and the bathroom is one step closer to being functional.

Nothing however was donated or trashed in the completion of this project. Total liberated pounds remains the same.

After my late night book sorting frenzy last night, I had prepared 7 boxes of books for donation. Total weight was 187 pounds. On a whim, I decided to see if there were any used bookstores in the area that might take some of my nicer books.

After appealing to the Google God I found a bookstore a short jog from my house, Kazoo Books.

The staff there was very friendly and I'd like to thank Gloria for her assisstance. Aztec the cat is adorable, by the way. Every respectable bookstore ought to have a cat.

Total Liberated Stuff: 785 pounds

I find most of the decluttering journey I have embarked on to be easy, yet time consuming. It isn't hard to throw things away for me... I'm not a person that has an irrational attachment to material things. My problem stems from not culling the herd as often as I should, and ending up with too much crap too quickly. That attitude holds true for everything but... books.

I have a love affair with books.

My house has an entire room devoted just to books, a library complete with a smoking room for my pipes. It sounds like a bibliophile's dream. To a degree it is. Yet I feel a sort of guilt over my massive book collection.

I have books I have never read, nor may ever find the time to read.

I fall in love with the ideas I find in books, and then hold on to them. I fall in love with the ideas in books I don't have the time to read. I hold on to book to give to someone later, I hold on to books because books have been one of my few passions. I hold on to books because in my house growing up, books were almost sacred. You do not damage a book nor abandon a book. I read so many books as a child I had to have eye surgery.

But here I am in my adult life with an actual library... and I find that the room has become so dominated by immense bookshelves that I'm a bit overwhelmed by it. I've got big books, coffee table books, books I've not read in 10-15 years, books I've never read but bought for the ideas I liked in a cursory reading. Working in a bookstore in highschool didn't help my book hoarding any either. I've got an aunt who has so many books, she takes books and turns them into furniture. Her bedroom nightstand is about 100 hardcover books with a glass top. Her basement is a tomb of somewhere shy of a billion books. I think its genetic.

So you can imagine the difficulty in which I part with these books. I love them. How will I know which ones I will miss? How will I know which ones I should have saved for my daughter to read? Will she find Calvin and Hobbes as funny as I did? Will she find the humor in Garfield as stupid as I did? Will the Farside amuse her? Will she like science fiction? Will she cherish Brian Jacques? I can't imagine that she'll read my old coffee table book "Modern Air Combat" from the early 1980s. Maybe?

I'm even attachment to my college Chemistry textbook. I hated chemistry and I'll never read the book again... but I paid $180 for that stupid book and I can't believe that the best price I could get from any online book seller was $2! Yet what joy or serenity does that 12 pound portal into hell give me? None!

When I've finally culled my library down, I'll post the total donated pounds of books.

Faced with the reality that I still had pants and shirts from highschool hanging in my closet, I decided to cull my wardrobe today. Between my closet, part of my wife's closet, and the piles of clothing we had sitting in the attic... there are four 60 gallon trashbags packed with clothes to be donated. I was amazed at how quickly they filled up. I still have more to donate. I had no idea that between my wife and I we owned so much clothing.

I used this system to determine what would be donated. Right away anything that was in disrepair was immediately discarded. With the remaining clothing I asked myself these questions:

• Is it in style anymore?
  
• Did I wear it in the last 3 months or the last season such clothing could be worn?
  
• Is it the right size and cut?
  

Answering those three questions yielded a radical reduction in my wardrobe. I still had dress shirts from the 1990's with the little buttons on the collar stays. I haven't even seen a shirt like that in years. Last time I saw it, I'm pretty sure the guy wearing it had his pants on backwards and a high-top fade. I also owned a velvet pirate shirt. I don't know why, and I don't even remember buying it. I have some vague memory of a wild time in Germany.

I don't consider myself to be particularly sentimental, yet for some reason I had continued to hold onto clothing that I never even wore. I actually had a few pairs of pants with the tags still on them.

In order to keep my closet from slowly filling back up with unused clothing I'm instituting a system. After wearing and item, when the item is returned to the closet, I will hang it with the open side of the hanger hook facing the closet door. Items that have not been worn, will remain with the open part of the hanger hook facing the back of the closet. Every three months I'm going to donate all the clothing that is still hanging unused in my closet. If I didn't wear it in the last 90 days, I likely won't wear it in the next 90 days.


Now while in my attic and closets I also kept a big trash bag with me for actual trash. As I worked on the clothes in the attic and came across other things I'd ask the following questions:

• What the hell is this?
• Do I use this?
  
• Is it an accessory to something I actually use?
  

99 percent of the time... I sort of knew what it was, I didn't use it (after all it had been in the attic since I bought the house 2 years ago) and even if it was an accessory to something I actually use... I must not actually be using it, or I'd miss the accessory. I filled up another 60 gallon trash bag with that kind of junk. I've still got a whole attic full. I'm seriously entertaining the idea of renting a small construction dumpster and throwing away all my stuff at one time in one furious weekend of clutter slaying.

Total crap liberated from my house in the last 2 days?

351 pounds of trash (old paperwork, newspapers, magazines, clutter.)
57 pounds of microwaves (don't ask)
190 pounds of donated clothing

Total 598 pounds liberated.

I plan on returning to the attic with pick ax and a donkey later this week.

Today I begin documenting my quest for organizational zen.

I have come to the realization that I have more physical posessions than any human being needs. If my house was burning down right now, I wouldn't know where to find the really important things. When the fire was finally put out, I wouldn't be able to even begin to catalog all the things that had been lost.

This bothers me. I am going to systematically go through everything I own and throw out or donate every thing that isn't directly useful to my day to day life, beautiful, or of such intrinsic value I could never replace it. I'm willing to bet 95 percent of my accumulated material wealth doesn't fall into any of those categories.

I'm not after attainment of the organizational-porn trafficked in magazines like Real Simple or the Hold Everything catalog. I don't particularly want to live in a prop set with little acrylic boxes of designer soap in my bathroom and a perfectly cascading chenille throw on my leather wingback chair.

I do however want to know where everything is, be able to find paper work in under a minute, know what the balance of my various checking and savings accounts are at a glance, and have a slight clue what is going to happen in the next 30 days, as opposed to remembering something important a day too late.

This is where being organized comes in handy. Take a man whose entire worldly possessions fit in a backpack. He knows where is stuff is, how much stuff he has, what he can do with that stuff, and so forth. Now take me.

I've got a large dutch colonial, a wife, and an adorable six week old daughter. I've got so much stuff that unlike the man with his backpack, if I open up a bag or box in my house I'm more likely to say "What the hell is this?" I've actually got boxes in the attic that I've moved from my childhood home to college to my first apartment to my second apartment to my third apartment and then to my house. Boxes which contain god knows what I've never used in last 7 years of my life.

This is where my quest begins. I am going to document what it takes to organize my household to the point where my wife and I are no longer two explorers finding new things every day and rehashing the same trails to find the same lost objects (or bills, cellphones, watches, assorted small children, etc.) but instead will merely be custodians of a smoothly running household.

Here I'll post updates, tips and tricks, even total pounds of crap hauled from the house. I'd like to throw or donate at least 2 tons before spring comes.

I will not be buried alive under my own clutter, damn it!