As a trend watcher, the new year seems like it would be a great time for blog post fodder, but my email in-box is very quiet, and my creative juices barely flowing. Seems the new year is a much better time for introspection than for sharing NEW products, NEW ideas, NEW trends!
I’ve been doing a little introspection myself as I recover from a month of extroversion of the social and consumer variety, and while I don’t tend to make new year’s resolutions, my next few posts will be guided by some principles I’m attempting to follow in 2012.
First up, let me share with you some tips for how I’m trying to get more organized this year. I am not an organizational queen (I believe I’ll bestow that title on Grumble Girl…I mean look at that woman’s stationery drawer!), but with a few days home after Christmas I took stock and identified some areas of my home that needed help.
Project 1: My Closet
I love clothes. I love to shop. Sometimes my intake overtakes my output and my clothing collection gets a little crazy. That’s when I know it’s time for a little judicious weeding and sorting.
This year I invested in some quality hangers, and I can not recommend these enough.
Not only did the exercise of physically moving my pieces from old mismatched hangers to new, quality hangers force me to assess each piece and prune judiciously (using the old, “have I worn this in the past twelve months?” method), but the fact that they’re space saving and uniform means I’m much happier each morning looking at this…aaaaaahhhh!
Project 2: Artwork
I’m a fairly harsh critic when it comes to my kids’ artwork. We live in a house with very limited wall and storage space, so if it’s not fridge-worthy, it tends to end up in the recycling bin fairly quickly. That said, I (like every mother) think my kids are the most amazing little people in the world and find some real treasures in their backpacks. My 6 year old daughter tends to bring home more art projects in a week than her 12 and 10 year old brothers have brought home in their lifetimes.
I realized when we moved the living room couch to make room for the Christmas tree and under it I found a pile of her work that had come home from a daycare she left over two years ago, that it was time to get organized.
I picked an afternoon when I could savour all the art in a relaxed way, poured myself a glass of wine and started picking through my 3 artists’ masterpieces. It was a personal little trip down memory lane, but I ended up left with a controllable pile of really great stuff (and a much fuller recycling bin).
Away it goes out of sight…
But that’s just step one of this organization project. I’ve given myself a deadline of next summer to find a rainy day when I can photograph each piece and upload all masterpieces into a folder on my computer. Then I’ll actually be in a position to create my own masterpiece when I make a photobook of all of their artwork, complete with information about who made what and at what age. I absolutely love the photobooks I’ve been doing of our “year in review”, and I’m coming up with so many other ideas for how to use them.
Clutter can be a nasty thing; it’s overwhelming and depressing. These two little organizational projects have cleared my mind a little and help me sleep at night. What do you do to keep the clutter down (in your house and in your mind)?