122. When Organizers Get in the Way

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you may have gotten so good at getting rid of stuff that now you have too many... organizers. But Sara, you say, isn't it a better problem to have that there are now empty organizers for future projects? The answer is... sometimes. Listen on to see when it's OK to keep organizers, and when they are simply just in the way.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

So I worked a lot at home today, and one thing that I've realized, especially over the past few years, is that there is such a thing as too much organizing. That doesn't mean that you have a specific place for every little thing, and that's bad. It doesn't mean that you actually put together something custom. It doesn't mean that you spend a lot of time on something. What it can mean is that you actually have too many organizers for your current space. Now, a lot of you are thinking, well, that's impossible because I have a lot of stuff. Once you actually get a lot of your items pared down and you know what you're going to keep, sometimes you can really get caught up in having too much. Having too many totes, having too many bags, having too many baskets, having too many hampers or laundry baskets or pantry items. It is good to have organization, but once you start moving stuff around and once you start getting rid of actual product, whether it's clothes or shoes or bathroom items or kitchen items, sometimes you're left with the actual organizers that they were organized in, and they don't really translate into the next project. Now, we ended up moving a few months ago, and I've talked about that quite a bit in the last, I'd say 10 to 15 episodes. It took a while to figure out what I actually needed to keep from the old house. Now I liked everything. It wasn't like I had purchased some organizers and they were weird colors and they didn't match the new place. It wasn't that they were a weird size and I couldn't use them here. One of the biggest things that happened was that we went from having a kitchen that had a lot of shelves to a kitchen that doesn't have a lot of shelves that are more like a buffet, if that makes sense. Like we had a long countertop that had shelving underneath. We also had a lot more drawers. Here we only have a few drawers, and only one of them is a deep drawer. So I say all of this to say when we were at the other place, I felt like I had more bins that actually went on the shelves. And I also had some like deep bins that went in the deeper drawers. And then we also had two or three shallow drawers per side. So we actually had a lot of shallow organizers, and it left it open to not only be able to put silverware and you know some of the larger kitchen utensils, but then I could also have not a junk drawer, but a miscellaneous drawer. There's a difference that actually had items that I would need in the kitchen, for instance, like a digital thermometer. Okay. So where some people may pull out a drawer and there's batteries and coins and a digital thermometer and some of this random stuff, like extra keys. We've talked about junk drawers before. This is actually a drawer where you have kitchen items, but they're random and they're all sorted out. And so I was able to have a drawer like that. Here, I pretty much had to decide okay, what's gonna go in the shallow drawer, what's gonna go in the next size drawer, and then what's gonna go in the deep drawer. And then everything else had to go on a shelf. And some of the shelves are a lot higher at our old place. I could reach the top shelf. Here, everything is taller, and instead of giving us the option of having like another shelf, all of that space has to be filled with either stacking bins or like some kind of wire shelf or a wood shelf or an expandable shelf or a spice rack. So you kind of have to work up higher, and sometimes you have to stack in order to do that. So I have been working with a lot of different things, trying to figure out okay, what am I gonna do at the new place? Today I spent some time actually working on this. And one of the things that I really wanted to do, even if this was the only thing I was gonna do today, was the shelf that's above my coffee maker that has a lot of my coffee stuff in it. I wanted to move the shelf down one peg, and that was my only option. I wanted it lower. I only could go one more peg down, and I thought I'm at least gonna do that. I'm gonna wipe off the shelves. I'm going to clean out the couple of little baskets that I have that hold my coffee and like the little three-ounce cups that I use for my almond milk that I pour in my coffee. And so I kind of spent a little bit of time right off the bat today pulling that stuff down, climbing up on the step stool, moving that shelf down one. And then once I cleaned out a couple of those bins and put everything back up, it just instantly brightened my mood. Like I could see a difference right away. And then the top shelf, I'm not really worried about. I think eventually I'm gonna use it for storage, but then that one has to move down one. And the little pegs are those stupid, stupid plastic ones where you have to push in the plastic piece in order for the shelf to pop up. These aren't as stiff as some of them can be. Some of them are so tight that you have to take a flathead to push them in. So you're literally using tools to push these little things in while you're trying to pop up the shelf. And so I thought, okay, instead of looking at this as an entire project, I'm just gonna look at it as I want one shelf lowered, I want to clean off the shelf, put everything back on. So that was done. That was done in probably 12 minutes. Okay. That is why doing 10-minute tasks are so important because that had been bothering me for a few weeks. And I just didn't take the 10 to 12 minutes to do it. Now, today isn't a 10-minute task, but it's just the overall concept of sometimes there's just one thing that we need to do in order to let our brain kind of settle and feel better about the space. And then if you want to go on from there, you can. And for me today, I actually had a little bit more time to do that. And I was also scanning papers on the other side of the room, and then I was shredding those papers, and I've been working on my files after talking to Sean Lemon, the digital organizer. And so I had a load of laundry going. I had paper scanning, and then I was saving them and shredding them. And then, you know, I'd go back over to my phone and I'd start another scan, and then I would go over to the shelf and I would wipe off the containers and put them back on the shelf and all the coffee stuff. And so I was able to do some of that today. And once I did that, I actually wanted a new little bin for my coffee pods and I pulled one from somewhere else. And when I did that, it made more sense in the new place. And then I took something else and shifted it to where that bin had been. And so I actually worked on that little section next. And even though it's not perfect, it made me see that what I need, I don't have. So I got on Amazon, I got on Target, and I was trying to find an acrylic bin at the exact measurements that I wanted. There are a couple things that are close, but I know that I can find exactly what I want if I spend a little bit more time. And I may even go to the container store to get it. I'm not sure yet. Um, like I said before, ours in Nashville is very hard to get in and out unless you live in the Green Hills area. It doesn't really make sense to drive from Franklin to Green Hills for one thing. So that's why sometimes I lean on Target or I'll order from Amazon. And I just haven't found exactly what I want yet, but I know it's out there. So when it comes to organizers, the physical organizers, not the people, we can talk about the people in a few minutes, and we probably will. Sometimes the organizers themselves can get in the way of your project, and that's just a lot of times because they're a carryover from something else that was different. You know, whether it was just a different room or you're completely moving stuff from one house to another, sometimes the project is just different, and you have to let go of the organizer that no longer serves you. Today, what I did, I had like five or six of the Whole Foods bags that have the handles. And I've told you before, I saved those specifically to donate. I took three of them. I had three container store shirt boxes, which fit perfectly inside of them. But what I did was I actually filled each container and then put each container inside a bag. You don't have to go through all that. It's just a method that works for me. And so if I'm working on a project like this scanning project, for instance, I've got it all spread out. And so throughout the day, it's like, man, this place is a mess. But I scanned a lot of papers, I shredded a lot of papers. I know that when I go to clean it back up in a few minutes because I wanted to sit down and do this first, and then I want to go clean up my mess, and then I want to go take a hot shower and relax for the evening. But I know that once I clean up that paper mess, it's gonna look a lot better than when I started this morning. Part of it is because a lot of those papers were stored in those container store shirt boxes. And there's nothing wrong with the shirt boxes. I actually could take them down the hall to my storage closet and I could put some of my cleaning inventory in there and stack them on the wire shelf. I've done that for years. That's a very, very simple way to organize is container store plastic boxes on a Brightroom or Lowe's or Amazon wire rack, like a five-tier, three-tier, wide, narrow, it doesn't matter. But I keep thinking, I keep using the same organizers for a lot of different projects, and it's getting to the point where it's just not working the way that I want it to. Now, what my plan is, I'm gonna get rid of these organizers. So I've got three. And then I went into my son earlier and I said, we have to get rid of these pajama pants, they no longer fit you. And he's like, no. So since they're fleece, I told them that he could wear them until Christmas. And then when Old Navy has their sale again, and it's not even about them going on sale. If they had them right now in July, I would go get him a pair that actually fits him. They look like little capris at this point because he just loves how they feel. So I'm like, okay, I know you love them. That's why I brought them in to you so you could tell them goodbye. And then the way that we joked about him keeping them and you know, he's trying to hide them under his pillow and stuff. I'm like, okay, you can keep them until I get you a bigger size. And he's like, okay, deal. And I was like, but you have to get rid of something else. I was like, let's find you a sweatshirt, let's find you, you know, oh, try on your pair of jeans. Because his legs keep growing. And that's the thing is that when he tried on clothes a couple months ago, everything fit okay. But you know how these kids are. All of a sudden they have a gross spurt and nothing fits. So I try to keep ahead of that just because, first of all, he only has one pair of jeans right now, just because he lives in like under armor pants like I do. But as soon as I saw the jeans hanging in the closet, I said, Hey, try these on. I think they're gonna be too short. And sure enough, they were. And I said, Okay, you can keep your pajama pants, you can keep the sweatshirt because I brought in a sweatshirt and he's like, no. But when I saw the jeans on him, it was obvious. I said, Those clearly don't fit you. And he's like, that's fair. And he took them off and handed them to me. And I'm like, okay. So he donated a pair of jeans. I donated a couple of things that were in my closet, and I put them in the shirt, container store, plastic box. Then I put that box straight down into a Whole Foods bag and set it aside. And then what I'm gonna do later is I've got some manila folders, I've got, you know, some different things that are thin. I can slide down beside them. And that makes me feel like I've actually filled a bag. So when it comes to a lot of these organizers, and even like some of these manila folders, some of these like cardboard envelopes that I have where I can package stuff if I need to, sometimes all of that can become too much and you don't realize it because where it is in your home, it's not taking up very much space there. You know, like a six by nine envelope, if I've got 20 of them, doesn't really take that much space as far as like all of my office supplies. But when I cut that in half and I decide to donate 10 and I put that in a bag with a bunch of other stuff that I've cut in half, not literally, but you know what I'm saying. I've divided it in half. I'll go in and grab some of the old socks that my son doesn't want to wear anymore, but they're in good shape and they don't have holes in them. And I literally just match them up and throw them in the bag. I'll go grab a tank top I don't wear anymore. You know, I'll grab maybe a little pair of sandals that I thought were cute. Maybe I bought them for $15 a few years ago, and I haven't really worn them, and they're not really named brand. So it doesn't make sense to like try to list them and sell them on eBay or take them to a Play-Doh's closet or take them to some of these resale places where they're only gonna offer me one or two dollars and then they're gonna sell them for like $15 or $20. So it's not that you can't do that stuff, it's just when is it worth it? What I did instead was as I'm getting rid of stuff, I'm also getting rid of organizers because now some of my organizers have gotten in the way of my progress as far as freeing up some space because these organizers take up space. If there's stuff in them and you're using them and you like them for the area that they're stored in, then that's great. But sometimes we can push a bunch of empty organizers aside when we have sold some stuff or gotten rid of some stuff or we've moved, and now we just have a tote of totes or a box of boxes or a basket of baskets, right? And so sometimes we hold on to stuff thinking, well, we need to keep these organizers because I'm gonna get unorganized in this room. I just know it. You know, or what if all of a sudden I want to put all my old jeans that don't fit me right now? What if I want to put them in a tote? Well, I think what you should do is I think you should focus more on what do I want to keep and what do I want to get rid of, instead of, oh, I can actually keep these five pairs of pants because I have this tote that I can put them in. Instead, look at it as listen, I love these five pairs of pants. One of them I think I can squeeze into this fall. I was able to last year. They're a little bit stretchy, whatever it is. And then the other four, let's put them in the Whole Foods bag. Let's put them in a container that we're donating, not just in a container just for the sake of filling the container. That's when organizing can kind of get backwards on you. Does that make sense? We get the organizers to organize the things. And then at some point, if we're really, really consistent and we get rid of stuff, then the ratio is off. Then you've got more organizers. And even though technically you can still use them, sometimes you realize that if you get rid of the organizers, it's gonna free up more space. And then you're gonna be able to see new potential for some of these old areas that you keep trying to work on, but you keep hitting the same wall. You're like, I just don't know why this doesn't look right here. And sometimes it just means it's time to let the organizer move on. Now, I love a good double meaning when it comes to organizers getting in the way. The other thing I wanted to mention is sometimes you can hire an organizer or organizers over the course of a few years or however long your project is, and they bring a bunch of stuff. And you're like, well, I am paying them. They probably probably know what's best. And then they leave. And then as you start shifting stuff, you're like, um, I don't know if I need this area that organized, like that broken down to where now you've got a lot of tiny organizers within larger organizers. And so that is something to think about. You may end up in a situation where you took some advice from an organizer when your gut told you, I really don't want a lot in this space. I really just want to be able to see everything. If everything is lined up on the shelf side by side, I think it's gonna work for me. And then an organizer comes in and says, you know what, you need to get some totes to put all this stuff in. So it's not a bad thing. Everybody organizes differently. And for those of you who kind of doubt yourself sometimes and you hire an organizer, sometimes that is the lesson you need to learn that, yeah, they did a good job, but it's not what I want. And now I've paid them to do it, and now I'm stuck with their product and the things that they recommended. And so sometimes you just kind of have to stop and say, if this space were empty, what would I do with it? If I didn't have this rack here, or if I didn't have this built-in custom closet where now I can't hang a lot of stuff, I actually have a ton of shelves, then that's when you can say, okay, if this room didn't have anything in it, including the systems, the closet systems, what would I do differently again? And sometimes that will help you look at a space in a very clean way, in a fresh perspective, where you're like, I probably wouldn't go buy those organizers again. And if that is your answer, then sometimes it's better to say, you know what, they were $5 a piece. I only had four. I've used them for three or four years, someone else can use them. And you can always post them on marketplace. You can always say, hey, you know, I've got six cubes or I've got four totes with lids. And, you know, you can put five, $10, $15, whatever, on the whole set. And then sometimes people will say, Hey, I was gonna go pay $30 for those, I'll just come pay the 15, and then I've saved money. And then you can put that money towards the organizers that actually will work for your space. And sometimes if you get to that point and you've got a measuring tape, then that's when you go measure and you say, Okay, I think this will work, but I'm really looking for this specific tote. And like I said at the beginning of the episode, I know it's out there, I just have to find it. So I hope this episode was helpful. Please consider subscribing to the bonus content. The minimum contribution is only $3 a month, and you have access to all prior bonus episodes that I've recorded in the last two and a half years. Please make sure to follow us on YouTube, labeled organizing. A lot of future episodes are gonna be on YouTube, especially if I do reviews on products or I'm showing you how to organize a space. Alright, everyone, thank you so much, and I will see you in the next episode.