Know What You've Got

I live in a house with two other packrats, though one of them, my husband, is far more of a packrat than our daughter. As a result, we have stuff all over the place around here, leading to a tendency to knowing that we have something but having no idea where in the house it might be.

In theory, I know where things are, but I am also well aware of the fact that many things are rather disorganized at the moment around here and many things could be arranged in a more effective way. So I have an ongoing project to rearrange things in a better way, knowing full well that this will not be accomplished any time soon.

An early part of this project was to make an attempt to catalog the books in the house so that those that need to be accessible to everyone are actually in a convenient spot for them to be used. That means that books related to gardening are on the shelves in the living room, closest to the back yard, cook books are on the shelf in the kitchen, and so forth. So far, so good - at least the books are somewhat in order. Next!

Part of the process have to involve deciding whether a particular item should be retained, and, if so, where is the best place to keep it. As an example, we have one filing cabinet that is used to retain important documents, and hopefully, anything that needs to be kept can actually be found in that one cabinet instead of landing in some other place.

In an ideal world, there would be enough storage in the area of the house where items need to be, but all too often, that is not possible. It would be nice if we had room to store the linens for our master bedroom in the master bedroom, but that just doesn't work in our house, so they have be fit into the hall linen closet, along with anything that relates to the bathroom, such as supplies like soap and towels and so on. At least,there's some logic behind that arrangement. There are actually two closets in our hallway, one a double closet meant for coats, and the other that small 'linen closet' afore-mentioned.

That coat closet ends up being the final resting place for far too many things, simply because it is bigger. Ideally, many of the things that end up there could be better placed on the utility area shelves, but we tend to be lazy about putting them there, as it's more convenient for them to be near at hand.