You know that satisfying “plink” you hear when you’re sorting metal into jars? Shortly before the shutdown, I was helping one of my clients who had just leased a new car clean out her garage so that she could get the car inside. She told me that the sounds we were generating brought back memories of her childhood.  

Her parents, she said, enlisted the whole family when they attacked their annual spring cleaning chores. She was given a choice of whether she wanted to help her mom in the kitchen — that could be organizing the pantry, polishing some silver, or defrosting the freezer (aren’t we glad that this chore all but disappeared!), or she was assigned the task of helping her dad clean out the garage. She chose the garage every time. She told me how she loved the feel of the various sizes of nails, bolts, screws, and hinges and that sound they made as she helped her dad tidy up his garage workshop.

Having a neat and orderly garage feels great. There is nothing like putting your hands right on that screwdriver, old rollerblades, or Dustbuster attachment when you need it. Plus, if you are thinking about getting your house ready to sell, a garage is an area that is often overlooked. 

Often, I am asked to help clients reclaim garage space so they could finally get their car inside and protected from the elements. Some are lucky enough to have a two — or even a three — car garage, but even then it’s likely that the part that does not house a car has become filled with clutter.

Follow these simple tasks and your garage will be neat and organized.

First off, your garage (like your attic and basement) should not be a catch-all place for things you don’t want to deal with on a daily basis. If your garage has become the go-to place to store unwanted items, take the time now to decide if someone in the family could use it, or if it is worth selling or donating. If not, take it to the town dump or call a Dial-a-Truck service to remove it. This goes for old lawn mowers, sporting equipment, beach chairs and toys, outgrown bicycles, things you will never get around to fixing, snow shovels that hurt your back to use, and gym equipment. 

A good approach is to pick a beautiful day to tackle the project so you can pull everything out of the garage onto the driveway and sort it into piles. You just may be surprised about how many duplicate items you have. 

Create broad categories, like things for the beach, the car, sports equipment, tools, home improvement items, holiday items, and things for the lawn. Do you keep your garbage pails in the garage? You will need to create an area for garbage and recycling as well. 

Decide what area of the garage will be used to store each category. Use all the vertical space! Create storage areas with peg boards and hooks to hang miscellaneous items. Invest in some strong shelving for paint cans and other heavy items. Look on Pinterest for some great garage storage ideas. And who says it can’t be pretty?

Make sure you finish by sweeping, vacuuming, or using a heavier Shop-Vac for random nails and screws that may be on the floor. Then find a good place to store the Shop-Vac!

Once your garage looks the way you want it to, make a commitment not to let things pile back up. Add the garage to your annual spring cleaning list to make sure it stays in top form.

We are all looking for at-home tasks to complete around the house to make us feel more productive during this quarantine. Why not organize your jewelry? It will be good for you to know what lives at the bottom of your jewelry box, and productive to catalog it to pass along to loved ones.

Here are some tips for your best organization:

1. Separate it into costume and the real stuff. Some better costume pieces might be valuable or have great sentimental value, so don’t discount the importance of any particular piece of costume jewelry. 

2. Perhaps you inherited some heirloom or vintage jewelry that you just don’t wear, or have pieces that you think are outdated. Why not redesign them into something you love? Many jewelers have CAD software that will show you exactly what a new piece will look like, and you can tweak the design with them so the piece becomes something you absolutely love. Reusing old stones and old gold is a wonderful way to honor the past and preserve sentimental value.

3. Some charitable organizations are happy to take your less-than-perfect items, including single earrings and broken pieces.

4. Take unwanted gold jewelry to your favorite jewelry store to sell for scrap.  

5. Separate some of your fun costume jewelry by color, so that you will be ready with some beautiful combinations to accessorize your outfits when the world opens up again.

6. Polish anything that is tarnished, and store it in a sterling silver keeper bag.

7. Build a history around special pieces — whether they have great monetary or sentimental value. Have you seen any of the photos of Kate Middleton wearing jewelry that once belonged to Princess Diana? Wouldn’t it be wonderful for your daughter or your niece to know the story behind the piece she is going to inherit? Do this by printing out its story — when did you get it? Who bought it for you? Was there a special event you wore it to? A special dress you paired it with? As a bonus, if you have a vintage photo of yourself wearing it, attach that. You can put the piece, the description, and the photo together in a pretty quilted bag. 

Once you have all your jewelry organized, invest in some fun containers that will allow you to see your collection. Do you want a dresser-top box that closes, a designated jewelry drawer in your dresser, or do you want to display your jewelry on the wall? There are boxes and organizers that will help you store even your chunkiest bracelets and longest necklaces. Look at Pinterest for ideas on creative ways to display jewelry inside your closet, from as simple as hanging it on a pegboard with hooks, to stately jewelry armoires that resemble Victorian furniture and full-length mirrors with hooks for jewelry hidden inside. 

Remember, if you don’t know what you have, then you certainly can’t wear it. Now that you are all organized, you will be good to go when we can regroup for the Ladies’ Luncheons and Nights Out on the Town!

As we begin our third week of Coronavirus isolation, I’m checking in to see how everyone is faring, and hoping that you are employing some productive alternatives to spending too much time on social media, and can keep from visiting too often your now-neat pantry to see what your next snack should be!

Organization is not just about cleaning out the refrigerator and pantry, which we talked about last time; it’s also about organizing our time wisely to get to some important tasks in the rest of the house.  

Perhaps we have found our “new normal,” and we have carved out some regular time during the day to exercise, to try new recipes, to chat online with family and friends, and even to read more.

See if you can schedule some time each day--even a quick 15 minutes--to tackle some organization task in the house. You will feel such a sense of accomplishment!

Here are four ideas for you to do now. 

Clean out your recipe files. You may have a folder of recipes you have torn out of magazines or printed from the internet. Organize them by appetizer, main dish, side dish, and dessert. Make separate files. Make notes as to whether or not you tried them, and if you changed them up at all. Be sure to note if it was a success. Other categories might be special occasion dishes, large gathering meals, Sunday brunch, tea party. Get rid of those ones that sound good, but you know you will never actually make.

Spend some time in the car. What really lives in your glove compartment? Get rid of  old packets of take-out condiments, pare down the supply of napkins, keep only your current inspection and registration cards. What else has accumulated in that center console?

Clean out your smartphone! Go through those old photos and eliminate the nearly identical multiples of the same shot. Create some folders for the photos to live in. Go through your notes and organize them and delete the ones that are for older items you don’t need anymore. Go through your apps and delete the ones you never use. Edit old messages and emails. You could free up so much storage space on your phone that you may no longer need to purchase your monthly additional storage plan. 

Go through your old receipts. Many are probably from stores that are no longer in business. Toss them. Make a folder for larger important household purchases like your kitchen appliances. Keep stuff for the car separate. You probably have a lot of receipts for items that you no longer have.

Commit to doing one of these items each day this week, and come the weekend you will feel like you really got some stuff done this week.

“So where do you start and what can you do to make yourself feel productive amid such uncertainty?”

You are okay on toilet paper. The fridge has goodies. Your plans are all cancelled. You have a few good books and know what Netflix shows you want to binge watch and in what order. You have nothing but time on your hands.

The next few weeks will probably be rocky, but you will come out on the other side of it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could say you accomplished a few things during this time?

So where do you start and what can you do to make yourself feel productive amid such uncertainty?

Why not consider this time at home a windfall for accomplishing some of those pesky organizational chores that you have been putting off forever? Here is my list of a few in-house jobs that you could actually accomplish and that will make you feel that this time is not wasted.

This blog will start in the kitchen. Next time we will look at other parts of the house.

I’ll call it the Corona Kitchen Plan.

Pantry

Things you can do right now:

You just stocked up at the grocery store. Now it’s time to organize everything you purchased. Group your foods (cans, pasta, spices, chips, baking items) by category in your pantry. 

• Look for older items that have expired and toss them out. If you have multiples of an item, make sure you put the older items behind the newer ones. 

• Face all labels forward. It just looks nicer this way!

• Put all the items you need for a task together. For example, your coffee and tea bags should be grouped with your filters and sugar packets; your meal replacement bars should nest alongside your protein powder.

Organization tools you can find on Amazon, at a hardware store, or maybe even in the basement

You can add a few hooks to the sides of the pantry for hanging oven mitts, kitchen towels, and aprons. 

• One of my favorite hacks is to hang up a shower organizer for plenty of bonus storage. You can even use one as a rack for your produce like onions, potatoes, and garlic. (Just be sure to store your potatoes and onions far from each other or else they might spoil quickly.)

• Similarly, you can use a shoe rack with plenty of pockets for storage of many different pantry items.

• A different type of door rack can be used to keep all of your lids for your pots and pans organized and out of the way, thus freeing up space in your pots and pans area. 

• A Lazy Susan in the corner of the pantry can help organize all those packets of soup and dressing mix and spices you don’t use that often.

• If you are lucky enough to have an open wall in your pantry, you can hang a pegboard on it and hang all your pots and pans for even more free space in your cabinets

Refrigerator

Many of the same tips can be applied to your fridge and freezer. 

We are all being so careful now to clean every surface we come in touch with.This is a perfect time to deep clean your refrigerator. Take everything out and wipe down all surfaces and compartments. For those sticky drawers, put some hot, soapy water in them and let them soak for a bit. 

Remember that meatloaf from the MLK long weekend that was so delish? Sorry to say, it still lurks in a Tupperware behind that bag of spinach that expired last month. It’s time to really go through and toss out expired foods.

When it’s time to put it back in, place Items that expire fast — like eggs and milk — in the back of the fridge where it is the coldest. Eggs should be stored in their original cartons where a more constant temperature will be maintained.  You can store condiments, butter, soft cheeses, and processed juices in the doors. 

You can use another smaller Lazy Susan in the back of the fridge for condiments.

Small sticky baskets can be attached to the side of the fridge for items like string cheese and condiment packets. 

Clear office file organizers can be used to store snacks for easy access.

If you line your produce drawers with paper towels, it will make cleaning them out so much easier. 

Don’t forget to replace the box of baking soda. Keep it near the back to soak up odors. 

With everyone home for the next few weeks, the kitchen will get even higher traffic than usual. Everyone will be looking for snacks. It will be nice to know that everything is clean, organized, and ready to go. These tips will help you lead A Simpler Life Now.

Until you have experienced firsthand the euphoria of opening your pantry and being able to pull out the crushed oregano; putting your hands on that humidifier receipt from 2017; or finding that photo of Great Aunt Edna your daughter needs for the school ancestry slide show, you can’t imagine how good it feels to be organized.

Cleaning up is nothing new, obviously. I’m sure your mother made you clean your room on a regular basis when you were a child; perhaps you even had family spring cleaning time, when your job was to pare down some of your toys, games, and knick knacks.

Now, thrift stores are being overrun with donated items, and countless magazine articles remind you that your children will not want your “treasures.” It seems that everyone has jumped on the less-is-better bandwagon. 

Paring our things down and organizing the ones we have chosen to keep is liberating. It’s like a fairy tale come true!.

We owe a lot of this liberating minimalist trend to the modern day Mary Poppins — Marie Kondo. 

But unlike Mary Poppins, Marie Kondo didn’t just appear out of thin air to solve the world’s problems.

Or perhaps she did. 

Like Mary, Marie seems “practically perfect” in every way, and, she tells us, once we incorporate her philosophies into our routine, our lives will be vastly improved too. 

While we will never really know where (or when) Mary came from, we do know a bit more about Marie. 

She has been running her tidying up business for many years. So what is it that made her become such an international sensation that Netflix chose to give her a television show? Why has her name become a verb, as in the process that organized-wannabes across the country are using to pare down their items to those that only “spark joy?”

The answer is that she, like Mary, is needed. Right now. Our lives have become overrun with possessions. We are holding onto them for so many different reasons. 

If you have watched a few episodes of Marie Kondo’s hit series, then you realize that Tidying Up is about solving problems. About releasing emotional baggage (and carpet baggage!)  Like Mary, Marie helps you to improve the way you feel about yourself and your immediate world. 

Extrapolate that, and it makes you believe that a neat tee-shirt drawer, folded scarves, and color-coordinated sneakers will not only give you inner peace, but will improve your relationships with those around you. 

Organized people are more in control. They exude happiness. Their moods improve, and that impacts everything around them.

I get it. I really do.

Sounds like a bill of goods, but you know what? It’s true!

You just need to learn the tools that will help you figure out how to do it. Even without magic, you can live A Simpler Life Now.