General rules + flexible thinking = a space that fits you NOW
Right now, I am thinking about you and me, and how many of us are privileged enough to be sequestered in our homes in this time-out-of-time moment. (And to those who are not afforded this luxury, I see you, I hear you, my heart and my prayers are with you—especially those who work at grocery stores: HEROES ALL.)
So, I’m guessing, for those who are at home, the pain points of your space are getting evermore magnified.
Perhaps that omnipresent pile of crap on your counter is teetering into avalanche territory, or the shoe soup in your entryway has caused everyone living in your home to break at least one toe from tripping over it. Or maybe you binged the entire season of Marie Kondo and thusly have given yourself A Project to help keep you from crawling the walls, but emptying your all your closets into one pile has you overwhelmed and drinking what a mom-friend has dubbed “no-no juice.”
Then, friend, I’d like to offer some general guidelines about configuring your space that I’ve been thinking about for awhile—some words that I hope will comfort you and make you feel flexible in your thinking. Home organizing is NOT all-or-nothing with your stuff and how it’s arranged. It’s about creating an environment that authentically supports your now—which is ever changing. I don’t mean that’s carte blanche for chaos, I mean that your expectations—and your space—should be evolving, guided by some organizing principles (pun intended):
Integrity: It is not inherently bad to have stuff. What I encourage is for you to be in integrity with what you own—that you are choosing to keep it because you want it, not because it’s the default to be there. Know what you have, want what you have.
Seasons: Just as there are seasons of life, there are seasons of stuff. And with that comes seasons of home configuration to accommodate that stuff—you won’t always have diapers in your house and therefore won’t need diaper storage for the long haul. There is no necessarily perfect answer about where something “should” live, there is just “this is what is working for us for right now, given the needs of our family.”
Curiosity: As author and creativity expert Elizabeth Gilbert says, reframing creativity as curiosity can help open up your thinking as well as lower the stakes of needing to produce something that others might judge as “perfect.” So too in home organizing. The question, “I wonder what it would look like if….” makes the task of putting your home together much more interesting (and dare I say FUN???) if you can think of it in this way. It’s asking yourself, “I wonder if I could fit all the travel-related stuff I have in this closet?” then following that curiosity to try it. And BONUS, during the process, you naturally pare down what you have. It’s a sneaky way to get yourself to go through a set of items.
Experimentation: Use the scientific method to put your home together—create and test a hypothesis related to a process and its equipment. “My hypothesis is that putting the spices on this shelf instead of in the cupboard would make cooking in my kitchen more efficient.” Then set up the experiement (i.e., move the stuff), gather data (i.e., see how it feels to live with it for awhile), and then draw conclusions (i.e., decide whether you like it or not). If your hypothesis was incorrect, create and test another until you find what makes sense for how you’re living in this season.
Zones: Having clear rules about what types of items live where can help you streamline your belongings as well as cut down on “scope creep” (i.e., little hoards of things all around your house that you forget about). For example, all the games live in the game cupboard, all the art supplies live on the art cart, all my extra ______ lives in the ______ (for more thoughts on this last one, see next bullet point).
Curation: Periodically check that the items you have physically around you reflect your current season (or the literal current season). You may have a lot of shoes (ahem), but you don’t need allllll your shoes to live by the front door—like, unless you’re a toddler, you don’t wear snow boots in the summer, so you don’t need them taking up all that real estate by your front door. BUT: Make sure you have a designated backup zone for the overflow of any given item! You may be curating the coats on your door-proximal coatrack, but be clear on where any other ones you have will live. This is how you don’t lose shit in your house. The End.
Stay safe and organized to your now-moment out there folks. Hit me up if you have any questions.
I promise you my room doesn’t still look like this. Nor do I for that matter.