 |
| Photo from "The Art of Clean Up" by Ursus Wehrli |
It's a slippery slope from ordinary tidiness to requiring matching hangars, alphabetized spices, and precision scheduling systems NASA would envy.
---
Hi. I'm Susan, and I'm an Organize-aholic.
I crave order. I need it. I can barely function without it.
I started as a social organizer, really. I just wanted a vaguely picked-up looking house. I didn't really care if I had to shove stuff under the bed or in closets and drawers to do it. I just wanted it to seem neat in case someone dropped by.
Before long that wasn't enough for me. I didn't just want it to seem okay to the casual eye. I wanted to be able to find things, and I wanted to find them quick. So I moved on to designating 'a place for everything'. Then, heaven help me, I started putting 'everything in it's place'.
That's when my problem began affecting those around me. I could hardly rest until things were put away and couldn't understand why everyone else didn't feel the same. I'd get belligerent: "I said the scissors go in the drawer by the refrigerator!"
If people couldn't join me in my sickness, at the very least, I wanted them to enable my problem.
Tidying led to organizing, which led to decluttering, then full-on purging. Then I was hitting the hard stuff. I started forays into multi-cultural organization. Yeah; I feng shui-ed. It all started out so innocently, but soon became an endless downward spiral.
I was always chasing the dragon of the perfect organizing systems. I was caught up in a world of adjustable shelves, over-the-door hanging pockets, paisley file folders, vertical baking sheet dividers, sock drawer organizers, accordion files, and color-coded sticky note planners.
Things went from bad to worse with the purchase of my first label maker.
Michael became concerned. I told him I didn't have a problem. I could stop anytime I wanted.
He tried to intervene. He broached the subject in a dozen different ways. "Aren't you getting a little carried away?", he'd casually ask. "Do we really need to paint the interior of the garage daffodil yellow? "Does it really matter if the labels on cans and boxes aren't all facing the same direction in the pantry?" "Does the broom really need a label on it saying: BROOM?"
We'd run to Lowe's for potting soil and he'd find me in the Home Storage aisle, my measuring tape out, mooning over peg board accessories. I'd sneak off to The Container Store to 'just look at' their shoe racks. I'd run to get groceries and spend all my money on storage bins. I promised to stop over and over again, but then would get caught with museum putty perfecting the placement of our adjustable silverware drawer organizers.
I was losing sleep scouring places like Simple magazine and Pinterest looking for clever ideas: a mag strip to hold bobby pins! Brilliant. I'd graph out endless imaginary garage projects. What if we hung the bikes from the ceiling?! I stayed up 'til all hours watching, taking notes on, and re-watching Alejandra Costello videos. (http://www.alejandra.tv/home-organizing-videos/)
Michael was losing patience. He never knew where things would be the next time he reached for them. I was constantly 'perfecting' my systems. I became more and more angry and defensive. I guess I hit bottom the day I responded to his worried questions by printing out a label (1"-white background-bold font) that read: TO DONATE, stuck it to Michael's forehead, and went back to organizing holiday decorations into their specially-designed boxes.
---
Well, I'm exaggerating a little.
...but only a little.
Michael does, truly, get nervous when I go into declutter-mode. He often says he's afraid he won't make the cut on the next go-round. Which is silly, of course. Not only because I'm crazy about him, but because I need someone to show off my latest organizational triumphs to.
It's true that clearing and arranging gives me a real buzz. This won't come as any surprise to Facebook friends who followed my epic pantry project. The closet near the kitchen had all the cleaning supplies in it, and extra kitchen stuff was either crammed in kitchen cabinets, or in a remote closet about 40 feet away. It only made sense to switch out the uses for the closets.
Just because that involved re-doing the direction the door opened, ripping out some strange little built-ins, buying and hanging two new shelf systems, repainting all of it, buying storage containers, and moving everything back and forth repeatedly...doesn't mean it wasn't worth it. It now saves us steps and frustration every single day. AND (this is my favorite part): it looks soooo cute and tidy!!
My brother-in-law once gave me the 'You're insane, right?' look when I told him I was creating a gift-wrapping station. When you think of it, most of us already have gift-wrap stations. The problem is they're all over the house. The gift bags are located in the cupboard above the washing machine, the rolls of wrapping paper are in the hall closet, the tape and scissors may, (or may not), be where they're supposed to be in the kitchen, and the tissue paper and bows are in a box under the bed in the guest room...squashed and unusable from when those cassette tape organizers were shoved on top of them.
It's not so much that I like to organize things. It's more that I like them to be organized. But, once I get a vision of how something could work better or look better, and start getting into it, I do almost enjoy the steps. I often wish I'd taken more time between getting the vision and getting stuff pulled out of the problem area and spread all over the house. ("You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.", I like to say to Michael when he can't walk into the bathroom for all the junk on the floor.) I almost always forget to take 'Before' pictures. I'm already well into purging stuff we don't love or use, putting things together in ways that make more sense, arranging them so they're easy to get to...
It's a control thing, too. Out of all the things in a day that I can't control, at least I know where to find the extra pasta or toothpaste, the receipt for my cell phone, or a dictionary. And every time I breeze through a workout, packing for a trip, my morning routine, paying a bill, or making dinner, I pat myself on the back for making it so easy to get things done.
My most recent organizing victory was just this week. I organized our games. (Yes, I'm serious.)
We'd always kept them in a cabinet under the TV. It was never ideal. There were no shelves in the tallish cabinet, so everything was pretty piled up and inaccessible. But, we did know where it all was. If we wanted to play Monopoly, cards, or give a visiting kid something to do while the grown-ups gabbed...we'd just look in that cabinet.
Our den renovation project knocked all the games out on the streets. Half of them went, temporarily, into a quilt chest, (so, yeah; completely buried), and the other half got wedged into the little cabinet where I keep my workout stuff. (Formerly, where I kept only my workout stuff: very, very, neatly.)
For the last few months, every time I went to grab my weights I'd have to reach past a pile of board games. And getting my exercise mat out frequently involved an avalanche of Legos. Not good. Wrestling Mr. Potato Head to get at an exercise DVD is reason enough for me to want to blow off a work out altogether.
Having everything back in order feels great. It gave me the incentive to clear out things we don't use, and with the shelves in the new cabinets they're so much easier to get out. This small organizing victory makes me embarrassingly happy.
Just because that involved re-doing the direction the door opened, ripping out some strange little built-ins, buying and hanging two new shelf systems, repainting all of it, buying storage containers, and moving everything back and forth repeatedly...doesn't mean it wasn't worth it. It now saves us steps and frustration every single day. AND (this is my favorite part): it looks soooo cute and tidy!!
---
---
It's not so much that I like to organize things. It's more that I like them to be organized. But, once I get a vision of how something could work better or look better, and start getting into it, I do almost enjoy the steps. I often wish I'd taken more time between getting the vision and getting stuff pulled out of the problem area and spread all over the house. ("You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.", I like to say to Michael when he can't walk into the bathroom for all the junk on the floor.) I almost always forget to take 'Before' pictures. I'm already well into purging stuff we don't love or use, putting things together in ways that make more sense, arranging them so they're easy to get to...
It's a control thing, too. Out of all the things in a day that I can't control, at least I know where to find the extra pasta or toothpaste, the receipt for my cell phone, or a dictionary. And every time I breeze through a workout, packing for a trip, my morning routine, paying a bill, or making dinner, I pat myself on the back for making it so easy to get things done.
---
We'd always kept them in a cabinet under the TV. It was never ideal. There were no shelves in the tallish cabinet, so everything was pretty piled up and inaccessible. But, we did know where it all was. If we wanted to play Monopoly, cards, or give a visiting kid something to do while the grown-ups gabbed...we'd just look in that cabinet.
Our den renovation project knocked all the games out on the streets. Half of them went, temporarily, into a quilt chest, (so, yeah; completely buried), and the other half got wedged into the little cabinet where I keep my workout stuff. (Formerly, where I kept only my workout stuff: very, very, neatly.)
For the last few months, every time I went to grab my weights I'd have to reach past a pile of board games. And getting my exercise mat out frequently involved an avalanche of Legos. Not good. Wrestling Mr. Potato Head to get at an exercise DVD is reason enough for me to want to blow off a work out altogether.
Having everything back in order feels great. It gave me the incentive to clear out things we don't use, and with the shelves in the new cabinets they're so much easier to get out. This small organizing victory makes me embarrassingly happy.
I'm not really sure that organizing can be called an addiction. But, if you saw how many times I've gone back to admire our game cabinet, you'd probably say it is.
---
What's your biggest organizing 'Win'?
What area of your house has become The Bermuda Triangle?
Does clutter even show up on your radar?
---
Photo Bonus!
Our happily reunited games:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for dropping by my blog!
Please share your Daily Hits of Happy. After all... shared happiness is doubled.