Saturday, April 9, 2022

“How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House’s Dirty Little Secrets”

I didn’t choose a theme for this year’s A to Z Challenge.  I signed up on March 31st, so there wasn’t much time to choose a theme.  I’ve been trying to loosely plan out my posts, though.  Experience has taught me that it’s frustrating to “waste” a post on an easier letter when I could have finagled that post to work for a more difficult letter.  I still don’t have an official theme, but the closest thing to a theme emerging seems to be “things I meant to write a blog post about a while ago.”  I seem to write a lot of catch-up blog posts, so I guess it makes sense to have a month devoted almost entirely to catching up. 

I think the first time I mentioned writing a post about decluttering was back in April of 2019, shortly after we started trying to organize and declutter in earnest.  So, three years later, I’m finally writing one.  We’ve made a lot of progress.  It’s still not perfect, but it’s a lot better. 

I’ve tried and abandoned a lot of decluttering and cleaning methods.  I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no perfect system, at least not for me.  I have, however, found three that I like bits and pieces of and have combined into one sort of system/method that seems to work for me.  Even though this is the one I’m sharing first, it’s the one I found last and probably use the least from.  Just to be honest, I’ve only skimmed the book and read a few chapters.   But I still think it’s worth sharing.

“How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind:  Dealing with Your House’s Dirty LittleSecrets” is a book by Dana K. White.  She also has a blog; A Slob Comes Clean, and a podcast. 

I’d rather end on a positive note (remember I said I only used bits and pieces from each system), so I’ll start with what I don’t like. 

The parts I don’t like are that the tone can seem a little bit goofy, and there seems to be a degree of “oh, look how cute and funny it is that I can’t get my act together.  Isn’t it hilarious that I’m a grown woman who’s embarrassed to let anyone in her house?!?”  I realize this is 100% my issue, but I HATE everything about being disorganized.  It stresses me out when things aren’t put away, we can’t find what we need when we need it, or if I feel like things are too messy to have people over to the house.  It’s humiliating and makes me feel like the person who never gets anything right.  I see zero humor in it.  That’s me and my issues, though.  I’m sure for plenty of people, the humor works.  The other thing I’m not crazy about is the podcast.  I’ve listened to two episodes, and they both seemed very rambling and disorganized to me.  Again, for some people, the less formal approach may be more appealing. 

Now that the negatives are out of the way, here are the things I love about it. 

She focuses a lot on letting go of the fantasy and embracing reality or not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.  This is something I’ve struggled with.  For example, for years, our spice cabinet was an absolute disaster.  Finding spices was an exercise in frustration because everything was just crammed in there, and jars and pouches would come tumbling out more often than not when you opened the door. 

I put off organizing the spice cabinet because I thought it would be just perfect to buy identical jars with cute little labels and put all of the spices in those and then organize them alphabetically.  It was part of my perfect kitchen fantasy.  I did have enough sense to know that it was going to be a very time-consuming project, so I kept putting it off.  Life kept happening.  I kept not buying the jars, not implementing my “perfect” spice cabinet system, and getting frustrated every time I cooked or baked and it was an ordeal to find what I wanted. 

I wasn't able to find a picture of what it looked like before.  Believe me when I say it was very, very bad. 

Finally, I got fed up and decided that good enough might work.  I combined all of the spices that I had duplicates or even triplicates of because I bought more when I couldn’t find them and grouped them mostly by cuisine in baskets, with the most commonly used ones being on the counter in a spinning spice rack. 

My system is this:

The ones I use daily or almost daily are in the spinning spice rack.  The baskets have spices usually used together; for example, spices used in baking are in a basket, spices used in Indian-style food are in a basket, etc. 

Is it perfect?   Nope.  It’s definitely not a Pinterest-worthy “look how beautifully arranged my spices are” setup.  Is it better than it was before?  About a million times better!  I can find what I need when I need it.  Bottles and jars aren’t falling out of the cabinet, and I don’t feel like a disorganized failure every time I need a spice.

The other thing I really like about this system is decluttering without making a bigger mess.  It seems like projects always take longer than I think they’re going to.  I don’t know how many times I’ve started a massive decluttering project on a Saturday morning, being perfectly willing to spend the whole morning and even part of the afternoon on it.  I drag everything out, make an absolute mess, get in way over my head, and that becomes the entire weekend.  This means I’m not about to try to declutter anything for the next few weekends because I don’t want to give up an entire weekend again. 

So I finally decided to try doing the really obvious parts of a decluttering project first.  Our shed was the perfect place to implement this.  Normally, I would have hauled everything out, had it all over the carport and the driveway, and we would have been stuck dealing with it all weekend.  

This time, I started small.  There were lots of rusty old paint cans from before we even bought the house.  Those were easy.  We definitely weren’t keeping them, so I was able to get rid of them.  I didn’t have to find a place for them, and getting rid of them gave me a little more space to work.  

Next was getting rid of a few broken tools, then hanging the good tools up.  


It took some time, but I didn’t hate the process.  Now it looks like this.



Is it perfect?  No.  There's definitely still room for progress.  But it’s so much easier to find the yard tools we need when we need them, and it’s so much easier to put the lawnmower away, which, in a weird way, makes it a little easier to cut the grass. 

So those are the two systems/methods I found to be most useful from “How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind:  Dealing with Your House’s Dirty LittleSecrets.”

What about you?  Have you read the book?  Do you have a favorite organizational or cleaning method?  Is it a struggle for you to stay organized? 

11 comments:

  1. Some great ideas. After being in the clinic here for almost 4 months my place will have lots of dirty secrets when I get home, so I will need to do some serious cleaning! Hugs, Valerie

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  2. I find our systems break down over time and we must tackle the organizing again. Sigh…such is life.

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  3. Organizing is just something I’m naturally good at. Plus, I love to clean and throw things away. I think part of most people’s problem is that they just lack the space to be organized. Our last house had very little closet space, which made things difficult. I had stuff crammed in weird places and then I couldn’t find it, so I do understand the issues.

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  4. I admire your systems and energy!

    Beth
    https://bethlapinsatozblog.wordpress.com/

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  5. I like how you broke up the decluttering of the shed instead of doing your usual method of decluttering like you had in the past. Small doable things do eventually get the project done and it looks great! Our spices were terribly disorganized and we had a lot of them too since my hubby likes to use a lot of different ones in his cooking. He got similar plastic tubs like yours (kind of like individual ones you would put silverware in) and he organized the spices alphabetically in them. Not all fit in the space allocated so some spill over to the shelf above; mainly the taller spice jars that were too tall for the lower shelf where the majority of the spices are.

    I haven't read too many books on organizing though my DIL was watching some videos on YouTube with how to organize this and that. So far she has great ideas but hasn't put anything into practice :)

    I think I have the same A/Z theme you do. Blog posts I would have written in the past but didn't :)

    betty

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  6. I know what you mean about the lawnmower. You waste mental resources thinking about how much time it's going to take to get out and then put back, and so you put it off longer than you should.

    Congrats on getting your spices sorted. Now you can use the space. You can always go back later and make it pretty. And now you know what you have and how you want it to work, so sorting it for pretty will be even easier.

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  7. I have not read the book, but I have one basic rule. If stuff falls out of the cabinet, closet, etc. whenever I try to find something, it gets cleaned out and reorganized to minimize the frustration that comes with that situation.

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  8. I love that you are learning and applying the things that work for you, Danielle. And how neat that you are seeing progress. You go!

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  9. I go through decluttering phases. I'll be all in for a while, then I quit. I think our problem is that we have too much stuff. Clint has his stuff, his mom's stuff, and I have my stuff, my parents' stuff. I keep saying we need to clean and get organized, and we make progress, but we never seem to finish!

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  10. I haven't found a method that works for me yet. So I'm stuck in the, "I'm trying to keep things organized, but OMG people are going to see how bad of a job I'm doing of it!"

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  11. I like the idea of decluttering without big mess. It would be worth it for that alone to follow this. I walk into my art office and look around helplessly and walk out. Still working on that one. Thanks for a wonderfully informative post!

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