Olive, the bins for medicine idea is brilliant! I’m going to do that tonight, and I have the perfect spot for the bins: the big deep cabinet above the refrigerator. (It stays cool enough to be my hidey hole for chocolate chips that would otherwise disappear before I need them, so it should be safe for medicine.) That cabinet is only good for seldom-used stuff like chafing dishes, but it’s deep enough to put meds in the front, and everyone who’s old enough to self-medicate can reach it. The first aid kit is already up there, so of course the OTC meds and pet supplements should be right there!
Now I need to train myself to do stuff immediately or systematically instead of letting it pile up. Laundry is my nemesis. I wash it and dry it, and then it never gets folded/hung and put away. My random crap piles grow into mountains. And every mess I clean turns into three new messes thanks to Hurricane Lily. (Which comedienne observed that cleaning house while the children still live there is like shoveling the walk while it’s still snowing?)
I will see your NeatDesk Scanner and raise you an iPhone app (although I’m sure there are Android/Windows versions galore). The freebie that I use all of the time (like several times a week) is called GeniusScan (for iPhone). Basically it let’s you take a picture of any document and store it as a PDF “in the cloud” - on Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox, or several other places, or locally on your phone to transfer to your main laptop/desktop ‘puter.
I use this app not just for random receipts, but flyers I see and want to review later, notices I must remember, even the hours of operation signs at businesses I frequent. But most often, I use it for holding on to my kids’ 3 & 4 star artwork (keeping only the very creme of the crop and sending other goodie to grandparents). For other paper keepers, I strongly recommend getting an app like this, it’s so freeing… Mentally as well as freeing up physical space and time that’d eventually be spent to declutter the stock piles.
I have CamScanner on my android; there may be others as well. While it’s not as good as a real scanner, it’s useful for small-volume documents when I want to get 'em scanned in a hurry and don’t have the time to go to the desktop computer and do it for real. I think I’ve got it set up so that it automatically goes up to Dropbox.
How did we miss this? Obligatory xkcd link.
Ironically, I came across this today because I am “decluttering” the unread items in my reader.
I could get rid of the box and probably be fine.
very frustrating few days. Instead of finishing up the kids’ rooms, we had to work on cleaning and treating the master bedroom for bedbugs. >_< I wish I knew where they came from.
I am so sorry. We had lice last week. While lice are easier to get rid of, it took days to wash all the soft things in my kids’ rooms.
(Good news is that it’s all clean now.)
I did the top of my closet on Saturday. Wasn’t a big job (took all of five minutes) but now I know what’s up there, at least.
Tonight I am going to try for the rest of the bedroom. I recently purged my clothes so it’s just going through all the other stuff (nighttable drawers are magnets for assorted stuff).
I also have to go into the pile of stuff from our upstairs bathroom to find soap and razors. The renovation is going to take an extra week (shocking!) and I didn’t leave out enough supplies.
I don’t usually buy things to organize things (I’m not a fan of “let’s buy cutesy hodlers to hold all of our junk!”) but I did get a mid-mod low dresser to store all of my papers, son’s DVDs, Wii games, teaching materials, etc. It’s going in the living room. The living room will look so much nicer and the TV is going on top of it. I already organized medical bills and my son tossed out all but 10 favorite DVDs.
Also took a bunch of stuff to the Goodwill drop off. I had organized everything so nicely and neatly and they just tossed it into giant bins. That sweater was $58 new! Eh!
I was getting caught up on the backload of laundry and putting all that away yesterday, as well as sorting through things and tackling some small areas but last night I had a full-blown asthma/allergy attack that was also accompanied by vomiting (I suspect some food poisoning was involved). Needless to say, I feel like shit today AND I discovered this morning that there was a leak above the linen closet so that’s another two loads of stuff that has to be done before the mildew attacks because, I guess, doing eight loads yesterday wasn’t enough. :rolleyes:
I am seriously contemplating using the drop-off service at the laundry. I usually don’t, but I’m not feeling well, it has to be done, and I’ll get it back not just clean but already folded. Then I can use what’s left of my energy for the usual dishes/garbage chores. And purging the refrigerator of anything that might be going off, just to be on the safe side.
Blech!! We had that, about 6 years ago now. Moon Unit brought home more than memories from summer camp. It was a few weeks before we realized why her head was so itchy.
If soft stuff can’t readily be washed, bag it up for a couple of weeks. Also be vigilant in head-checks for a few weeks - anything that survived the initial treatment might have survived (or missed nits might hatch). We did an oil comb-through every 48 hours for 2 weeks: soaked the hair / scalp in olive oil or almond oil, and then a careful going-over with a steel nit comb. I definitely found adults that had survived the initial Nix treatment, within 48 hours, and a few days after that found several adolescent (well, smaller) critters that had presumably just hatched.
Buying stuff to hold crap: oh yeah. Depending on what it is, it can either enable you to have excess stuff that looks marginally more organized, or can make what you have easier to find / use when you need it. I had all my spice jars in bins - which was fine except they were never where I thought they were, I’d miss them even so (e.g. oregano is in bin 2 vs bin 4). I finally spent a fair bit of cash on some Elfa spice rack stuff that attaches to the back of my pantry doors (all that cubic was going completely to waste, the pantry shelves were only half depth)… and now everything is ALPHABETIZED and EASY TO FIND. Yay.
I’ve gone through 4 out of 11 photo boxes. With tossing out the double prints, and compacting all the negatives to one box, and tossing the really bad exposures, blurry photos, etc., the 4 boxes are down to 1.5. I won’t have time to do much else with them for a few more days, but hopefully in a week or so I can get 'em shipped off to my friend. The boxes were incredibly dusty and there were cobwebs. I so look forward to being able to muck out everything from those shelves.
Ugh!! I think the drop-off service is an excellent idea in this situation. Gotta be done, neither you nor husband is up for it, and as you said it’ll save your energy.
If you have a fan or a HEPA filter available, run that in the closet to dry things out faster. Probably you’ve already thought of this, but if you’re feeling that wretched it’s conceivable it hadn’t occurred to you yet. I know I get kind of stoopid when I’m feeling that awful.
Fortunately, the humidity was down today (for a change) and the closet is dried out. The linens did, after all, absorb most of the water!
Feeling better, but still feeling fragile if you know what I mean. And my throat is incredibly raw but the allergy meds knocked down the reaction completely so I should be good to go to work tomorrow.
Well, I didn’t get to cleaning out the bedroom. I spent the whole night doing laundry. (Hubby was supposed to do it while he was working from home yesterday but somehow didn’t get to it.)
I did tidy up every room in the house so everything is put away. (Into overflowing closets and cupboards but it’s a start.)
I will try again tonight but last night was my only night alone (no kids, no husband) the chances of even keeping the house tidy are slim.
I was excited. I live in an apartment but I like it. It now has stuff on it and the Wii stuff in it and my papers and 6 drawers to spare. But while cleaning up the living room I noticed a dozen books on my shelf that could stand to go…and I don’t really need to keep old teaching materials. Not all of them.
I also have a lot of framed pictures sitting in boxes. The older my son gets, the more we collect…sigh. Photographs are going to be a Christmas break project, I think. I want them all in albums. No more ‘photo boxes’.
I went to the shoe store today (finding a pair of Cole Haan shoes that were PERFECT…and in someone else’s size, gah) and brought home one pair of shoes. I can wear them tomorrow for a date and they’re suitable for work. I passed over a pair of wedge sandals that were on clearance because I just tossed out a bunch of cheaper shoes I barely wear. The shoes weren’t a horrible brand or anything - Guess - but I’m trying to not let my newly-cleaned closet implode.
I just sorted out our meds drawer and chucked away loads of stuff from 2010 and 2011. Got to do this before my husband moves home next week and never lets me throw anything away again.
While I’ll be keeping my shared flat near Barcelona and using it as a travel base for the next project, I did go through the clothes I had and toss several pairs of shoes and a few T-shirts which weren’t particularly comfortable and not even good as sleeping shirts. I’ll be in my owned flat for the next two weeks and part of the plan is to go through the trunks and toss piles of old comics.
Yesterday I took the boxes of stuff I’ve been planning to donate and actually donated them (SPCA thrift store). Today I will snag a box from the office and start a new round.
That is really pretty! It looks like it would also be great used as a dresser.
Ever since the big organization spree I’ve been on, I’ve done some little things here and there but nothing else major. The beautiful thing is, though, our house has been clean for an entire month. Just by making sure I put stuff away whenever I use it, I’ve made such a difference for our environment.
The other beautiful thing is, I don’t have to search the house for random items all the time. I always know where they are, because they have a place!
Well, still haven’t cleaned out the bedroom. Our department took the afternoon off yesterday and drank A LOT of beer.
The good news is that my house was tidy enough to have everyone over. The bad news is that I am so hungover today that I KNOW I am not getting to the bedroom again tonight.
(I may have to have some redbull just to make it through the day. At least we are all suffering…)
I’m sad to say that actually this thread has had the opposite effect on me than I had hoped. After a week of being sick, and the unrelenting heat, I find myself entirely discouraged. Then I come here and read about people who have organized houses who declare their place a disaster because they haven’t dusted in two days or whatever and I look at what I’m facing and I think…
Why bother? It’s hopeless. This place is never going to get organized. I’m struggling just to maintain what I’ve done, I just don’t know how I’m going to keep improving.
I get one shelf cleaned off, turn around, and the spouse has already filled it up again. I’m tired of the arguing. I told him I wanted all the hardware stuff out of the kitchen and it’s another argument about how he can’t do things and he wants help and about how I’ve been doing all the heavy lifting and carrying and he isn’t doing what he is able to do to help out, or even give me some encouragement.
Or maybe I’m just feeling like crap mentally because I’ve been feeling like crap physically. I’m just really, really discouraged because I woke up to three or four days worth of dishes in the sink and overflowing garbage cans. Yeah, we’ve both been sick but it feels like all the progress I’ve made recently has been reversed. There should be a some sort of natural law against both members of a marriage getting sick simultaneously.
