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Community Corner

A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

Mission: Spring Cleaning begins with my buffet.

At the end of last week, I asked you guys to look around your house and identify something that you want to organize.  I chose the oh-so-neglected buffet in my dining room.  The next step was deciding what you want to use the space for. I want to store table linens, candles and board games in the buffet. 

So, are you ready to get started? I hope so, because I organized the HECK out of that buffet this weekend, and if I did it for nothing, I’ll be really annoyed.

I enlisted the assistance of Jenn Dubois, home organizer to the stars (well, if you count me as a star. And if you do, you really need to get out more). Jenn runs The Missing Sock, a home organizing firm here in central Jersey.  What I loved about my time with Jenn is that she gave me really concrete action steps that any of us can use to organize any space.  

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After identifying our area to work on, and figuring out what we want to use the area for, we now need to get to work.  This was always my stumbling point before.  I’d always start out with the best of intentions and end up with a bigger mess than when I started.  This time was different, though.

Jenn told me to “start the process with five clearly labeled boxes--Keep, Garbage, Donate, Recycle and Move (to another space in the house).” Now, I suddenly had someplace to put everything I took out of the buffet. This works just as well for a larger project, say a basement or a garage. Instead of five boxes, you may want to use tarps in the yard.  

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The object, one way or the other, is to get everything out of the space.  Once everything is out, you can look at the stuff you want to keep in it, and the space you actually have, and can determine if you’re working on a realistic plan.  I was absolutely astounded at the amount of garbage and recycling I had in those drawers. I mean, I knew I had a lot of papers, but I found the plane tickets from my honeymoon. We’ve been married almost 11 years.

I turned to the recommendation Jenn left with me, to get rid of any projects or hobbies that I haven’t touched in 6 months or more, when I came across a plastic bag that contained a half-done latch hook of Linus from Peanuts. I clearly remember buying it, nearly seven years ago, to make for my brother for Christmas.  Sorry, Dan. If I haven’t finished it in seven years, chances are, it’s not getting done.

As it turns out, I had more room than things to put away, once everything was out.  Following Jenn’s advice, I grouped like items together, and put all my candles and candlesticks in one cabinet. I used the drawers to hold my table linens (I really love placemats. And I think, with little kids, an every day tablecloth is almost essential to save the top of the table from spills and nicks.) The other cabinet has a couple incidentals that were kind of lying about the room, like a pitcher.

I like it this way so much, I’m thinking about other options for storing our board games, which I was originally planning on storing there, as well.

So let’s say you’ve gone through and pulled everything out, determined what’s going back, and now you’re trying to set your stuff up. You may find that you need some storage “pieces.”  Jenn suggests we “break out of the box by using nontraditional storage pieces... Kitchen drawer organizers can be used in the bathroom to hold makeup and toiletries.”  Genius!  Totally going to be my next project!

All told, this major decluttering and reorganization of my dining room buffet took me about an hour and a half.  I know this was just one piece of furniture and a lot of you guys may be staring down an entire room of clutter, but the principles Jenn taught me for dealing with my buffet can be used to declutter and reorganize any size space.

Let’s review:

  1. Determine what you want to use the space for.
  2. Gather together five vessels (I actually used two laundry baskets and three different colored garbage bags) for the sorting process. 
    1. Keep
    2. Garbage
    3. Donate
    4. Recycle
    5. Move
  3. Empty the entire space, chucking things into the appropriate receptacle as you go.
  4. Do a quick review, to make sure that the stuff you want to put back into the space will actually fit.
  5. Go snag whatever storage supplies you may need. Do this AFTER you’ve decluttered, instead of before, because what you need will probably change. If I’d gone out and bought a neat rack to hold those boardgames, I’d be out whatever money I laid down on it. Also, look around the house to see what you can use, before running to the store. I was able to use a box to keep the pieces from a Welcome sign  that change with the seasons.

Five quick steps, relatively painless, and my dining room feels so much better to me. Even though most of the clutter I conquered was concealed by drawers and doors, I know they’re cleaned out now, and that just makes me smile.

But Spring Cleaning is nowhere near done, guys. I chose a small project to get started, but this weekend, we’re going to start the REAL work. We’re going to move into our kids’ rooms.  I’ll be working on that today, so say a prayer for me, if you’re so inclined. And if you don’t hear from me soon, someone please send out a search party.  I’m goin’ in.

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