Saturday, July 11, 2009

Hilary's Kitchen drawers




On this visit Hilary and I worked on several drawers. The two nearest the phone I reorganized to make more efficient. All note pads and sticky notes, along with the telephone directory and address book ended up in the drawer nearest the phone.

Of course, the cooperation of everyone in the family is very important. If they go back to old habits of throwing things anywhere, the old clutter problems will come back, and these will turn back into junk drawers. I am trying to get the whole family’s impute so they feel involved, and might want to keep the place organized. They are starting to understand that items of importance were being misplaced, damaged, and lost, because of their habit of throwing them anywhere.


Recently we worked on Hilary’s pots and pans cupboards. It quickly became apparent that we need to find a way to make more room, since very little was going to friends, garage sale, or other cupboards. So I opened a side cabinet, and a top drawer and emptied these.


It turned out that Hilary had a shelf and a half full of paper plates, napkins, etc for block parties. A friend down the street is actually in charge of such things, and has a place to keep the paper ware. So we bundled them all up to return to her. Hillary can borrow what she needs as she needs it. This freed up a lot of space. The drawer was filled with junk that we were able to send to other locations or throw away. Between the two, we made enough room for all her pots and pans, with additional space for those still in the dishwasher!

Here are some comments from Hilary:

First, we took a tour through my house and she pointed out small, practical ways that I could implement getting years of disorganization under control. She gave advice like, "think about what you would like to use this space for". She gave me tips on what to tackle first (the not-so-bad areas), and said that the kids would be more train-able if they saw how things could be! Then we did a hands-on project together -- one kitchen cabinet. She had me get a bin and label it "FOR SALE". We took everything out of the cabinet together, then put it back in considering what we actually used and what was no longer useful. She had good practical suggestions and was really easy to work with. She made a project that would have been horrible by myself actually a lot of fun. I look forward to working with Lucy on lots more de-cluttering projects.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Music Closet


These are pictures of a closet in the process of being organized. I actually had to move some items out of the way in order to take the "before" shot! The client is a musician, and many CD's he cared about were found broken under all the other stuff. We moved the foot locker to another room where it could be used more effectively, and brought the filing cabinet in. He will eventually be able to store a lot of paperwork there, once he's organized it, which will eliminate the cardboard boxes still present. Many of the items in the "partly organized" shot were brought from other rooms. This closet, and the room it's in will be dedicated the music which my client practices and teaches. Even though we have not yet finished the project, he can now find what he needs. Instead of being scattered all over his home, his music tools and books are in the appropriate space. Before I took the picture, the white shelves had been on top of the foot locker, preventing him from getting to it. They had been sideways to the door, their content hard to see. Now that it is facing out, he can see what he has, and can reach everything.