Room organization tips

Marie Kondo the shit out of the place

Grease Fire.

Knick knacks out. No place for anything surplus to need in a dual function room, especially a workspace.

You answered your own question, you need more storage and you need help. Get a shrink or call Hoarders.

Do a Marie Kondo on your place. You don't even have to read her books. You can get the major points of the process by Googling for it online.

Or you can just follow William Morris's dictum: “If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

This website has six practical tips for hoarders to get started.

Get a scanner and a shredder. First, though, get help. Find someone who can tell you what's important to keep and what is OK to throw away. No sense to scan something that's not even important. The goal is to be paper-minimal or paper-free. I would also get help with computer organization.

I would also put the knick-knacks all in one spot, with an eye toward getting rid of all knick-knacks.

This is really important, because how can you sleep in that environment?

R4, there’s no substitution for editing.

I’m having to fold two households into one and there’s stuff that was important years ago, but now it doesn’t match or isn’t needed or whatever. I’ve been cleaning and arranging closets and rooms, but I found out NOTHING is so helpful as just removing one box. Just one. Suddenly you have a lot more room and then you realize how much easier your life is without that box. And how much better your house looks.

My criteria for getting rid of things now is, will I ever use this again? If the answer is no, out it goes not matter what it is. I’ve gotten rid of hundreds of books (because I will never read them again), clothes, because they don’t fit and will go out of style before they do), and right now I’m getting rid of Christmas ornaments and taking them to the battered women’s shelter.

I went there recently, and they told me those women have nothing but the clothes they stand up in. They have sons too, so men’s clothing can be helpful as well, along with kitchen goods, linens, plastics, small appliances, and lots of other small items. There are also charities that collect coats and warm things this time of year.

I’m giving them my mom’s beautiful Italian manger this year, because they need it more than I do.

The first year my mom divorced, we had no money, and she got a cheap or free tree on Christmas Eve and decorated it with a couple boxes of cheap glass ornaments from Big Lots. That tree was our Christmas miracle because if it had cost any more, we wouldn’t have had a tree at all. It was the smallest tree we ever had, a tabletop tree, but we were just as glad of it as if it grazed the ceiling.

I learned from that experience, that you don’t need hardly anything to be happy. Keep in mind, anything you give to charity now can be a cheap or free present for someone without much money.

Yay you, R8!

[quote]knick knacks in every corner

If you don't think any better of these things than to call them "knick knacks," get rid of them. I like things more than most anyone but I hate shit sitting around for the sake of sitting around. When people do this it looks like debris from sad, earlier chapters in their life.

William Morris (see R5) was right in 1880.

As for old papers, throw them out, shred them, whatever it takes to be rid of them. If you can't bring yourself to do it, organize the ones you don't imagine an immediate need for into half a dozen or so broad categories, put each of these stacks in bundle and then in a box or boxes and shove it in the farthest reach of a closet. You probably won't open the box more than twice in one year and more than once in the two or three years after that.

People without books in their homes are as untrustworthy as people without pets.

Still have a lot left, R11, but as I went through the bookcase, I realized how many were gifts or inherited from family or old lovers. Many were not my taste, I was keeping them for the sentimental value alone.

I’ve still got a large bookcase full, don’t worry, and have to fold about four more boxes into that. My space is limited, so I need to go through again and be extremely ruthless.

Whenever my bedroom starts getting really junky, I remind myself that I don't want my house looking like Nippy's drug den!

I need A LOT of FUCKING help in this department. I'm married to a guy who is very "A place for everything, and everything in its place." He is married to a guy who is very...."Wherever it lands is where it lives." Of course, I usually can't remember where the fucking thing "landed". The add-on issue is since I can rarely find where I put anything, I end up buying another one, (then naturally I find the original). so this has grown to be an ugly AND expensive situation. 20-ish years together, as we get older, he's getting--understandably--far less patient about this.

I know...I'm gross, I'm a sloth, I'm a shitty partner. Throw it at me. But if you could please mix the abuse in with some tips I would be most grateful.

*cringing as I click "post"*

R14, I’m going to tell you a horror story that hopefully will inspire you as it inspired me.

Many years ago, I lived with my ailing mother into my twenties. Eventually I left home. After I left, she continued to decline both physically and mentally, very slowly and gradually to the point that it crept up on us all. I moved to another city and came home but seldom.

My mother had a health crisis and so I returned. I went to visit her home. It was beyond filthy. A lifetime of mere untidiness had deteriorated, as she had, into hoarding. She had lived alone for a few years by then, and with no one to clean for her, in her enfeebled state, things had slowly and gradually fallen apart. It was apparent that her growing mental fog had resulted in an inability to be able to remember where things belonged, or to put them away. As she became more unsteady on her feet, she had suffered some falls and on the way down, had grabbed at furniture and overturned it or smashed the knick knacks on the shelves.

When I entered her apartment, a very heavy dining table was overturned on the floor. Bookcases had evidently been clutched at during one of her many falls. Food clutter and debris lay everywhere. The house was filled with roaches. The whole thing was like an episode of Hoarders. Filth beyond description in every room.

She was hospitalized and never returned home. It was my duty to empty the place, which took a month of picking through one filth-encrusted horror after the next. Almost everything in the house was either washed or discarded due to roach eggs.

This made quite an impression on me and my family. Years later, when my father became old and sick, he had a physical therapist who insisted he could not return from the hospital unless the house was nearly emptied of clutter. I did that, and he was able to stay home until almost his death. The therapist told me many elderly people refused to declutter, and as a result, after falls or injuries, were sent straight to a nursing home and never returned. They would rather keep their belongings at home, than go home and live without them.

I’m decluttering my own home as I speak. I’m not leaving a horrible mess for others to clean, nor am I going to lose the ability to continue at home over a few knickknacks, or because I am one day too feeble to dust them all. It’s not worth it. And I’m not old and feeble, but who can say how things may happen? I’d rather do it now when I can, than leave it to others when one day, all of a sudden, I can’t any more and it’s too late.

R14, now that I’ve scared you, here’s my advice: look on Netflix for Marie Kondo’s show or read her book. It helps put you in the proper state of mind to prepare yourself emotionally to let go of things. I’ve read a number of decluttering books, and her technique made the most sense to me because she treats people’s attachment to things respectfully. She doesn’t just tell you to throw everything away with no context.

Her technique, basically, starts with picking out every clothing item you own, putting them all in a pile, and once you see how many duplicates you have and how many pieces that don’t fit or are out of style, it makes it much easier to discard the unneeded pieces. You go through the house one category at a time. All the books, all the papers, all the knickknacks or toys, etc.

It’s much easier to get rid of things if you discover you have thirty pairs of identical pants, or thirty dinner plates, instead of simply trying to stuff it all into closets with new custom shelving. The point isn’t what fits in the house. The point is, what do you still like and use. If you don’t want to use it any more, discard it.

A lot of people’s attachment to things comes from feeling as if you haven’t got enough. The reasons for this can come from a poor, deprived childhood or a house fire, but the result is the same. You feel like buying more makes you more secure. Kondo believes people that are overly attached to material objects need to acknowledge their service and thank them for it. Then release the item and get rid of it.

I have noticed myself keeping very worn items out of sentimentality. Now I say, this item was used up. It served its purpose well and now it’s time to let it go. That’s helped me.

OP, are you hoarding stuff, or are you just messy? That is, are you accumulating more and more stuff and rarely throwing anything out? Are piles of stuff taking over your home? Or do you have a normal amount of stuff but never put anything away or straight up?

Anyway, I agree with all the above advice, but for starters - do this tomorrow, not "someday" - buy storage bins and put all the loose stuff in them. All of it. Your office will look better, and having things in bins makes it easier to sort and discard. Also, if you are not too far gone, putting things in storage bins will in fact result in a lot of it being throw away, as you realize there's no need to keep most of it.

Here you go.

R16

Don’t worry, I have a lot more than the picture at R19 left over. Also, it’s cleaner.

R14, the answer is you have too much stuff you dont care about. Where ever it lands tells me you think about as much of your stuff as a tube of toothpaste. Get rid of everything that is not essential or that you absolutely love so much you put it in a special space. Then as you need more stuff, which should be rare at this point, buy the best you can afford and trust me, when you spend a lot of cash on something you never did before, you will take care of it and know where it goes.

Thanks everyone. This has really been excellent advice for me, and I hope for the OP as well. R21 you especially opened my bleary eyes. I see that I really don't value much of what I have, and that is completely disgusting. We aren't rich that is for sure, but even if we were, it is not a good trait to to put it mildly.

R15 / R16 I am so sorry you had to go through that, and thanks for instilling the fear of god and roach eggs in me!

Cleaning up my act starting tomorrow morning. I already feel lighter and may actually get some good sleep tonight now that I have a plan. Besos, bitches!