repost: why I declutter

Metapost: my first attempt at the newfangled blogging thing ended when I decided I no longer identified with the name I'd chosen, and thus The Organized Geek was abandoned.  However, there was some good stuff in there, and I'll be reposting a few selected entries occasionally, so they don't get entirely lost to oblivion. 

Originally posted on 05.11.12.

---

Stuff is a part of life.  Stuff is accumulated, it serves various purposes, it's an indicator of wealth (did you see how big his flat-screen television was?), it makes us happy.  We need stuff, and over the course of history, most possessions have been valuable, scarce, and often important for survival. 

But that was then.  In the 'developed world,' at this point, stuff is cheap.  Ridiculously cheap.  Most things are essentially disposable; clothing, electronics, furniture, and even vehicles are all purchased with the expectation that they'll break, wear out, or fall apart in a relatively very short time and need replacing.  Where our grandparents would save up for and treasure a good winter coat for many years, we offhandedly own twenty that are all shoddy.  But it doesn't matter, because even before their short lifetimes are up, we'll probably get bored of them and buy new ones out of pure whim.  

Minimalism isn't really about not owning stuff.  It's about identifying value.  

At first blush, it might seem that the root cause of overconsumption, rampant consumer waste, and an actual topic and audience for the TV show Hoarders is over-valuing our stuff.  I can't possibly get rid of any of my twenty winter coats despite the fact that live in the tropics because I love them.  I need them.  They give me a sense of worth, and I would be losing something valuable if I didn't have them.

But let's think about this.

Is this really value?  What is value?  Is it what someone else would pay for the object, or some quantification of the pleasure or usefulness that you personally derive from it?  It's in your possession, after all.  Are you truly happier with many cheap, flimsy things than you would be with fewer really spectacularly well-made ones?  How do you know?

If you're deriving neither use nor happiness from the item, regardless of what you paid for it or what its 'original price' was, it is worthless. 

Are we, perhaps, actually under-valuing our stuff?  The phrase 'materialism' is generally used to indicate the hoarder-like behavior of accumulating stuff for the sake of accumulating stuff.  But what if we could forge a better relationship with our possessions, and genuinely care about them?  This is a fundamentally different approach.  Appreciating, taking care of, and really enjoying the things in our lives, rather than being ruled by them, seems to me to be a better form of materialism.  If you fell in love with an excellent coat, wouldn't you want it to last for years so you could go on enjoying it instead of throwing it away after a season?  Disposable culture has redefined our relationship with stuff, and not for the better.  Perhaps the problem is that we're not materialistic enough!

When I was little, I participated in the pog craze.  In case you skipped that one, it was technically based on a game developed with milk caps but turned into a pre-teen consumer frenzy in the mid-90's.  Kids bought, collected, hoarded, and traded these little cardboard discs with pictures on them.  Very rarely was the game actually played; it was mostly about the collecting process.  We'd set up little trading posts with each other, and proudly display our expansive collections.  It was quite the phenomenon.

At the time, I had some good friends who lived just down the street.  I'd go over to their house, we'd each claim a corner of the room to set up the pogs we were interested in trading, and then go visit the other 'shops' to haggle and barter.  My little mind was struck with a notion that seemed to have some merit.  My shop instituted a 'quantity for quality' policy, wherein I would encourage my friends to offer their good pogs and in exchange I'd give them piles of crappy ones.  I even made a sign.  They thought this was a wonderful deal.  They were getting ten pogs, while only surrendering one!  What a chump I was!

After a few weeks of this, my friends noticed that I'd accumulated all their high-quality (this is relative, of course.  Fundamentally they were all just silly little cardboard discs.) pogs, while they were left with piles and piles of really cheap, lower-quality ones.  They got sore about it and stopped trading with me.

If what you value is having many things, you will surely wind up with (metaphorically speaking) large piles of low-quality pogs.  Perhaps it won't be a deliberate or conscious process (my friends certainly didn't think to extrapolate the situation beyond each individual trade), but over time actions will align themselves with core values.  Then all the stuff will weigh you down

So what happens if you value good things instead?  If you can appreciate having a smaller number of things, but everything you own is your favorite thing?  Where moving is easy, and there are no piles to trip over, and all your possessions bring you joy?  Wouldn't that be marvelous?

That's why I talk so much about getting rid of things.  Not really out of any ascetic drive or sense of self-deprivation, but out of selfishness.  I want to love all my things, instead of being annoyed by how they're in the way and dusty and taking up so much space.  I want the freedom to take a job across the country and move into a smaller place.  I want to spend much less time thinking about, stressing about, and cleaning my stuff.  I want good stuff that actually enriches my life, dammit!

I'm in no way unique in this, of course, and there are many out there who are on the same journey. 

On one of the above-linked articles (I forget now which one), one comment in particular struck me:

"I don’t want to be rich, I want to be free. And freedom is worth more than stuff."

Yes.

new systems

As you know, I recently got rid of between a third and half of my entire clothing collection, which was no small feat.  I collect inordinate quantities of apparel.  It's not too hard on my wallet or financial plans, because 98% of it comes from yard sales and thrift stores, but it still takes up a ding-dang lot of space.  And it was frustrating because I could rarely find a particular piece that would be buried under everything else, and/or I wouldn't even really know what all I had!   I longed for a more curated wardrobe.  

So I went through the Great Purge of 2012, and boy did it feel good.  In the wake of that, I've been iteratively tweaking and reorganizing what's left, as well as removing the occasional unused item that's still hanging around, in order to optimize the overall system.  

Today I'm going to share what seems like a silly and insignificant little lesson, but that I absolutely love. 

I recently learned how to fold. 

Okay, that sounds even less climactic than I'd thought it would be.  Everyone knows how to fold clothing right?  You learned when you were seven, and your mom couldn't stand your habit of storing everything in a pile on the floor.  Or at least you shoved your piles into drawers.  I'm not judging. 

I'd kind of thought that all ways of folding were essentially equivalent.  Take garment, make flat and reasonably neat, stack in a pile.  Take things from pile.  If you want something at the bottom of the pile, you pretty much have to take the top part of the stack off, play a precarious game of jenga and caaaaaaaarefully extract what you're after, or cause the whole thing to topple messily and ruining your organization scheme in the first place.  Oh, and if it's all in a drawer, the stuff at the bottom is nearly impossible to see anyway. 

It's a small thing, but that little bit of frustration every day can get to a person. 

Recently, via this article, I came across a different way of both folding items and of packing them into drawers.  It involves 'filing' your clothing, so that each thing is both visible and easy to extract without disrupting the overall system.  As a bonus, it turns out that you can fit SO MUCH MORE stuff in a drawer, while simultaneously making it more accessible.  Oh Ceiling Cat, what a revelation.  

This drawer, previously only holding pajamas, now holds pajamas, my swimsuit and cover-ups, long underwear, T-shirts, and tank tops.  It's not perfect, but hot damn if it isn't incredibly convenient.  

Yes, these are my socks.  Yes, they're folded and sorted into rows.  Don't judge me.   

A combination of the Great Purge, implementing a seasonal wardrobe scheme (more on that later), and this new folding method has allowed me to completely empty out my enormously bulky and heavy Dresser of Doom.  My entire wardrobe is in the closet, in a container under my bed, and in two little drawered nightstand things.  They work well enough, but ultimately I'd love to find a small dresser with more shallow drawers in it.  The contents of both nightstands could easily be combined into one piece of furniture with similar overall dimensions as one of them, if it had shallower drawers, and hence more of them.  This system leads to a lot of wasted vertical space, even as it facilitates fitting more into the drawers overall despite that limitation.  Imagine the sheer optimizing power of the filing system deployed in a more ideal environment!

Sorry, my geekiness is showing there.  

Even my underwear are folded like this.  Previously, I was of the toss-it-in-the-drawer-and-smash-it-closed persuasion, as I'd given up on any sort of organization for drawers.  But this pervading sense of order, coupled with the ability to see and get at any particular article of clothing, really makes me happy.  It's the simple things.

weekend project: noms!

I love to cook.  So does The Guy.  We have gazillions (yes, that's a technical term) of cookbooks.  We also have so many recipes that have been cut out of magazines, printed out and folded for years, or scribbled on the backs of grocery lists.  He's had a pile of recipes on scraps of paper that have just floated inside a cookbook, sandwiched behind the front cover.  It was a bit of a deathtrap, admittedly. 

A while ago, I got fed up with that.  Finding a particular recipe was rather difficult, and they kept falling everywhere.  Enter The Great Recipe Organization Campaign of 2012.  This started a few months ago, wherein I began corralling stray recipes in a box, and going through our stash of back-issues of Bon Appétit for ones worthy of cutting out.  I was inspired by so many other projects like this out on the interwebs.  I found a nice big binder for the finished product, and a bunch of page protectors.  

Then all of that sat in the back room and was completely ignored.  

Until this past Sunday morning, when I hauled it all out and spread it on the kitchen table, sorting into piles.  The Guy pitched in, helping decide which ones to keep and what categories they should go in, and digging out his old family recipes from their hiding places for me.  

I ended up with five categories: new stuff to try, savory, sweet, old family recipes, and concept pieces.  I used write-on-able sticky tab thingies put right onto the sheet protectors to delineate the sections, but there are all kinds of tools for that sort of thing.  

All except the 'to try' and 'concept' categories exclusively contained tried-and-true recipes that were known to be delicious and we'll definitely want to make again.  Stuff from the 'to try' section will be moved to savory or sweet, as appropriate, once they're made and declared to be worthy.  The 'concept' section is for ideas that were kept just as notions, but not necessarily as whole recipes as written.  The idea of making a semi-frittata out of fettuccine is more important than the magazine's exact recipe for the tomato sauce to go with it.  We're semi-accomplished cooks, and free-lance off of recipes anyway.   Once tried, incorporated, and remembered, the 'concept' recipes will probably just be thrown away, but in the meantime they serve a useful purpose as a reminder of new ideas to try.  

Others might have different categories, of course.  Main courses, sides, breads, etc.  But for our purposes, and because I didn't really feel like sorting through with that fine-toothed of a comb, I stuck with some pretty broad categories.  It all depends on how you cook, what sorts of recipes you've got, and how finely you want to split hairs.  Perhaps as the book expands it'll undergo a reorganization at some point.  Who knows?

Here it is.  I've taken to calling it The Book.  

If a sheet protector didn't contain a full-page printout of a recipe, I stuffed in some blue paper I found in my craft stuff to serve as a backdrop.  Then recipes were just layered on top of the backing paper in whatever configuration made sense.  I found that they didn't even need to be glued down, which made the whole thing simpler as well as more modular.  If they shift around too much over time, some gluing-down might happen, ultimately, but for now it seems to be holding just fine as is.

The beautiful thing about The Book is that not only do we no longer have to dig through stacks of papers to find a particular favorite recipe, but the sheet protectors mean that the things are largely water-resistant.  This is good in a kitchen, as they'll be less prone to getting destroyed by water, blobs of cookie dough, and bacon grease.  To be fair, many of the recipes in The Book already have spots and stains from just such treatment, and I didn't bother to retype them or anything.  I think it lends character.  But the water resistance will add to their longevity, especially for those multiple-decades-old papers for old family recipes.  

By the way, we've already started using The Book.  Thy Guy made a delicious pilaf for dinner last night, cooking out of the recipe I'd transcribed into the book.  In case you're curious, it's originally from Alton Brown, the science nerd of food.  So tasty. 

And that's my weekend project.  I love it, and it's nice to actually finish something for a change.  Here's to many years of yummy cooking, expanded recipe collections, and good organization!

shinies

I like shiny things, and I like pretty jewelry.  My stuff is mostly of the gaudy costume variety, but it's lots of fun.

However, I had a problem.  All that prettiness was jammed into a too-small jewelry box, and the process of finding, extracting, and detangling a given piece was nigh unto impossible.  It consequently never got worn; such a waste!  I simply (I thought) had too much of it.  Then the Great Jewelry Purge of 2011 commenced.  I took over the dining table for a day, went through every piece, and only kept the ones that

1. were in good shape,
2. fit my current style,
3. actually went with at least something I owned, and
4. I absolutely loved. 

The theory was that if I could actually find and access the stuff, it might actually get worn for a change. 

I even took the better pieces to my jeweler to get them a sonicator bath to clean 'em up.  The purged rejects, still comprised of fun and funky bling, went to a friend's party where all the people there had a grand time going through 'em and picking out new favorites.  It's fun seeing my old jewelry proudly displayed on my friends. 

The remaining jewelry (about a fifth of the original quantity.  I'm down to five pairs of earrings.  Five!) was lovingly placed back in the jewelry box, where it promptly tangled into a hideous mess again.  

Well, damn.  Apparently I missed something.  

Then I found all kinds of nifty inspiration on the trusty interwebs.  People were conquering their disorganized jewelry realities with corkboard and picture frames, ribbons and drawer handles, cake stands and deer antlers.  Antique display cabinets.  Burlap.  Driftwood.  Old printer's cases.  Surely I could come up with something. 

I didn't need a lot of ring/bracelet/earring storage, because most of my collection is of the necklace variety.  And I wanted something to hang on the wall instead of taking up surface space on furniture. 

Poking around the garage, I found a little knick-knack display shelf that we'd bought and never gotten around to putting up.  Its white surface was a little marred, but I also scrounged up some black spray paint, and that took care of it.  Digging through a tub of hardware turned up a box of cup hooks.  My very small antique teacup collection perched on top of the shelf, for rings and such.  And then... voila!  A nifty jewelry storage solution, effectively for free. 

Incidentally, it turns out that cup hooks don't like being driven into wood without pilot holes being drilled.  Frustrating.  But on the plus side, I got to play with power tools!

Now I can actually see what I've got, and consequently it gets worn much more often.  It's a small thing, yes, but it makes me smile every time I look at it.  Sometimes small but brilliant solutions are plenty significant.  And hey, I got a whole five bucks for that unneeded jewelry box at my yard sale. 

today I love...

...this guide to organizing a kitchen.  Check it out!  Shortly after changing my name, I write about geeky organizing.  Go figure.

I've moved a lot in my life, and consequently have set up quite a few kitchens.  Like the author of this article, I've pretty much always used the 'where will it physically fit?' method of deciding where things go.  Perhaps it's silly, but I find the notion of consciously organizing the space in order to group things near where they'll be needed and with the other objects they're used with seems pretty radical.

Kind of makes me want to reorganize the kitchen.  I get urges like that a lot.



Every Wednesday, I write about something I love that day.  It doesn't necessarily have to be remotely related to anything; it just has to be fabulous!