Major De-Cluttering and Organization in the Watson Home

These last few months I’ve been throwing things out and reorganizing.  Every year I do this and it amazes me how I always find more stuff to throw out. This time around, I felt motivated to kick my efforts up a little (call it nesting), so I sought inspiration.  I found a terrific blog, SmallNotebook.org, to help me stay on course.  Among my favorite organization articles are “Paper Pile Makeover Results” (http://smallnotebook.org/2008/10/29/paper-pile-makeover-results/) and “Holding onto Sentimental Things” (http://smallnotebook.org/2008/09/22/holding-on-to-sentimental-things/).

SCHOOL BOXES

I went through all of my school boxes again and got them down from four large boxes to one box.  Four years ago, I had maybe 10 boxes, so four was still an improvement, but more could go.

Things that stayed in the box:

-Notes from original research

-Personal calendars

-Transcripts

As far as school notes and papers, I put them on the bookshelf next to books related to the subject of the notes.  I had one criteria:  They would be useful to me now or in the future.  How did I decide if they would be useful to me?  If I was willing to buy the information in my notes via book form, that was a good sign they would be useful to me.  This meant the notes had to be legible and nicely organized in the first place.  Everything else was tossed.  I have one folder for every subject.  All of my useful English notes, for example, elementary through college, are in one binder that sits next to my fiction books.

One of the many piles that got tossed (this is actually from a few years ago, but it’s representative):

 

SCRAPBOOK

I went through all of my scrapbook stuff.  I have one folder for elementary, one for middle school and early high school, one for late high school, one for college, and one for Ben and me over the years.  Everything has to fit in these binders, or it has to go.  We each have one little box of sentimental keepsakes from all of these years.  The things that go in this box are things that would only be important to me or Ben, but we don’t want to get rid of them.  And then we each have a box of journals.

I tossed it if:

-It made me sick to look at

-I couldn’t remember what it was

-I kept asking myself why I kept it in the first place (my middle school booklet of rules and regulations, for example????)

-I felt a picture of it would do

 

One of the things I kept:

 

LETTERS

I’ve kept every letter I’ve ever received.  I don’t know if that’s wise, but I have the space, so for now that’s what I’m going to do. Who knows?  One of my pen pals may be famous some day.  And I think these letters capture what kind of person I am and they remind me of wonderful people I know.  I’ve organized them by the person who sent them to me and where I knew them from.  All of the letters from my grandma, for example, are tied together and are stored in a box labeled “Adams Family.”  I have all of Ben’s letters to me in a special box.  Thank goodness for e-mail because otherwise I’d force to pick and choose whose letter to keep.  I have these organized as well.  Organizing digital information is just as important as organizing non-digital things.

Before:

  

After:

 

I did a lot more organizing:  the closet, our music books, the pantry, the garage (again), holiday decorations.  All of it was fun.  I have found that having a place for everything makes it so much easier to have a clean and organized home.  My goal is to have everything easily accessible.  If something is in a box piled under lots of other boxes, that’s a good sign that I really don’t need it.  If I do need it, it needs to live somewhere where I can easily reach it.  I think the main thing to remember is to keep things from coming into our home that we just don’t need and that we just don’t have the space for.  Learning how to keep things simple and to a minimum is an art and I hope to get better at it over the years.