Getting Organized

By nature, I'm a pretty organized person. I like things to be clean, to be tidy, to be in order.

But when life gets hectic, organization is often one of the first things to go out the window, along with healthy eating and working out.

Once I finished with classes last semester and had winter break stretching out before me (well, most of it, sans 10 days of travel), I decided to tackle some of the areas of the house that had gotten a bit out of control.

Warning: The images you see may shock you. Please do not think less of me. Instead, I hope you will be impressed with my willingness to share such sordid details with you, dear readers.

I started in the office, where I spend so much of my time, and where most of the disarray was centered.


Magazines and books were scattered everywhere. Mail littered the floor.


Christmas gifts I needed to mail covered the guest bed. In general, it was a disaster area. And don't even get me started on my closet.


You see, Conservative Hubby and I each have a nice-size closet in our bedroom, and then we each have another one in the office/guest room. His bedroom closet is filled with suits, dress shirts, and sweaters; his entire office closet is devoted to golf shirts. Seriously. I don't even want to know how many of them he owns.

My bedroom closet is devoted to clothes too, whereas my office closet corrals a random assortment of items—workout clothes, spare sheets, purses, scarves, wrapping supplies, and boxes, boxes, boxes.

As I believe I've mentioned before, I have a problem with saving items. I'm not a hoarder of the magnitude you see on TV, the sort who can't throw away anything even when junk is spilling out of the windows. But I can't ever seem to justify getting rid of perfectly good boxes, tissue paper, ribbons, and gift bags. That's why my closet looked like it did.

Once I started organizing, I decided to recycle stack after stack of magazines I was holding onto for no discernible reason (as a magazine person, it's my nature). There are still a lot of magazines left, mind you. But it's better.


I also organized all my books as best I could, put away stationery and filed bills, and found a new home for all my school bags and purses.


Then I whipped the closet into shape by weeding out boxes and bringing in some drawers to create a gift-wrapping station.


Ah, so much better.


Over the break I also organized the bathroom closet, the hallway closet, and the laundry room, which was overrun with boxes dating all the way back to when we moved into our house. It was difficult, but I decided to save only really sturdy boxes that are a good size for shipping. The rest I hauled to a recycling place in Bloomington, as L-Town is sorely lacking in recycling facilities beyond the most basic.

Conservative Hubby's Jeep was so full on my recycling mission that I couldn't have taken a passenger along with me. I couldn't see out of the windows. And I had to leave some boxes behind for a second trip. I'm not even kidding.

I've also been working on organizing the cupboards in our kitchen, although that is still a work in progress. I turned a tall cupboard that had been full of junk and miscellaneous dog items into a pantry, have started a pile of items to donate to Mission Mart, and have been moving things around to make space for a few lovely new pots and pans, small kitchen appliances, and (of course) some terrific new pieces of Pyrex.

I think I've made a pretty darn good start. But, as I learned after writing an organization story and copy editing a magazine on the topic recently, when it comes to organization, the work is never done.

Getting Organized

I realize that this blog post might bore approximately 50 percent of my readers, who are male. So I'll just warn you right now: It's about organizing my jewelry. Then again, if you're like Conservative Boy you may want to keep reading.

He was digging through a dresser drawer the other day and we discovered he has quite a collection of jeweled Sigma Chi pins, random earrings from when his ear was pierced (the rebel), necklaces from when he wore necklaces (no comment), and about 250,000 money clips. OK, I exaggerated a bit. It's only 129,000 money clips.

Anyhow, if you're like Conservative Boy or happen to be a woman, perhaps you can relate to the absolute mess my jewelry usually is. Up until a couple of weeks ago it was scattered. I hung some tangled necklaces on a hook in my closet, but the rest were crammed in random boxes and thrown into my nightstand drawer. My earrings littered the bathroom countertop and the top of my nightstand, were shoved in abandoned purses, and occupied a random jewelry box here and there. A mess, I tell you. An absolute mess.

And then I reached that blessed day when I decided I couldn't take it anymore. And I set to work organizing, without spending any money. So I rounded up some random bowls I had on hand (full disclosure: I cheated and bought two bowls at the thrift store for about a buck), scrounged around in the garage for the extra silverware organizer we had no use for, and headed to the bathroom.

Our big retro bathroom is blessed with a multitude of drawers, over half of which are empty because we don't have that many toiletries. So I commandeered two drawers at the vanity: one for my necklaces and bracelets, the other for the earrings.


Voila! Organized. And cheap. And easy.

There are, however, plenty of other clever ways to organize your jewels besides this little solution. To display your earrings, try my friend Cara's pretty earring organizer. I also love Sherry's ceramic egg crate at This Young House. And if I had $66 lying around, I'd buy this magnolia tree. But I don't have $66 and probably won't until Butter gets a job.

How do you corral your gems? Share your ideas here, as I'm sure to tire of the current system in, oh, 5 minutes.

Being Organized

If you happen to take a peek at The Home Know-It-All today, you'll see a picture that may look familiar to a few of you who have been to my house before.


It's the bookshelf in my office. It looks quite lovely despite the fuzzy quality of the photo. It's nicely organized, has a few decorative objects (including treasures from such exotic places as Russia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Wyoming), and likely will lead readers to believe that the rest of my house is just as organized.

Only what my coworker Katie failed to mention to you in that post, dear readers, is that on the other side of my desk sits the twin bookshelf. And it looks like this:


Oh the horror! It's like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. It's my right brain and my left brain side-by-side. It's public Julie and private Julie. My mom is so embarrassed right now. I just know it.

I am not exaggerating when I say that these shelves are a mere three feet apart from one another. The big difference is that the tidy one from The Home Know-It-All blog post is positioned so that it's visible from the office door and most of the room. The other one is harder to spot—and, for some reason, I instinctively turn left when I need to reference books or magazines, grab office paper, or use a tissue.

These bookshelves are a lot like my life. Very tidy and organized and well-run on the surface, but chaos just below. Conservative Boy has accused me of being "closet dirty." I wouldn't go so far as to agree with that. But if you spent some time looking around our house, really looking, you'd see that beneath it all things are a little out of control.

Take, for instance, "my" closet in the office. (C.B. and I each have a bedroom closet and an office closet.) The half that I can see now because I left to door open showcases colorful canvas cubes, each with a label such as "purses," "scarves," and so on. Below that, summer clothes and dress pants hang neatly. And below that, a set of plastic storage drawers holds my ever-expanding collection of Lulu athletic wear (and sheets, but that's boring).

Now slowly (and I mean slowly) slide the doors to the right to witness the left side of the closet. (The left side again! What is it with the left side?)

If you aren't killed by the resulting avalanche, take a moment to survey the scene. You will find an assortment of suitcases and duffle bags, in case I ever need to make a quick escape. (Joking, C.B. Joking.) Precariously perched on top of that? A random fuzzy blanket, gift bags stuffed full of an odd assortment of wrapping paper scraps, tissue paper, ribbon, and more gift bags (because I refuse to throw away any gift-wrapping I receive if it can be reused). And somehow, balancing on top of that, boxes. They're all fairly small boxes but there are quite a lot of them, because I also refuse to throw away any box we receive shipments of books, clothing, etc. in. Why throw away or recycle a perfectly good box you could reuse? Above, on the top shelf, you'll find even more boxes, an old camera, and more gift bags.

Which leads me to one important question: Where the heck did I get all these gift bags? (If you'd like to borrow any boxes or gift bags, let me know. I'll gladly share.)

This is perhaps one of the best examples of my secret unorganized life. But you'll find the same thing in other places. Our kitchen cupboards are pretty tidy, but don't you dare open the tall one to the left of the refrigerator.

(The storage container cupboard to the right of the refrigerator was in the same shape until one day Conservative Boy almost drowned in all the sliding containers, threw them all out of the cupboard with a roar of anger, and set to making tidy piles of each shape and size of container. For as much as I am closet dirty, he is a closet neat freak. What a pair.)

Oh, and don't open that third drawer down on my side of the makeup counter in the bathroom. Bad idea. Bad. Or the trunk of my car. And don't look in my personal email account either—the mass of emails in there has led C.B. to contemplate trading me in for a more organized model on multiple occasions.

Fortunately, he hasn't given up hope on me yet.