apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

shit, I have an entire room...

I have an entire closet of stuff, primarily fabric that I got for free working in a showroom and I am waiting to find a use for.

My boyfriend calls my side of the bed "the trough"... enough said.

Plus, I pulled out a dried chickpea out of my handbag today! But that is a rarity-I was taking some to my mum last week. The trough is a continuing issue though...

My dear husband used to call my side of the bedroom the 'war zone' as it looked like a bomb had just exploded in his eyes.
Now we live on a sail boat and have such little space I have to keep tidy!
I do have some 'war zone' drawers though just to make me feel at home :-)
www.kjellqvist.ch

I renamed the junk drawer "the useful drawer," and now it doesn't bother my husband anymore. The power of suggestion ...

At work, we actually have a drawer lovingly labeled "Some Things Are In Here." At least everything in it fits the category.

I've thought about it for years, and I think my need for organization breeds my messiness. When I don't have a category for an item, when something doesn't live by "a place for everything and everything in its place," then its place is along with everything else that defies organization!

My laundry pile! Luckily it's in a corner of the room where guests can't see it when they visit.

I have too many big ideas and too much stuff... I need a girlfriend to come over one day and just go through my closet and say... a high school jacket... babe you are 21 and hated high school, do you really need this? of course i will argue that I do, but if I get my best girl to come over and help she'll ignore me. Lol. I too feel like my need to be organised is making it harder for me. I reorganise ALL THE TIME! creating messes that take a week to put back together! the house is generally tidy though and always clean!

I recently started a drawer a day project (http://www.se7en.org.za/2009/01/18/saturday-spot-a-drawer-a-day) to deal with some of the entropy in our home and I am down to the last four drawers. I have decided to leave the junk drawer as it is, barely openable. A couple of months ago I did a massive clean out and managed to reduce the one junk drawer in every room of the house to just one in the kitchen and as a living momento of how our house could be I think I will leave said junk drawer as it is. Not to mention if it got tidied up more stuff that could be put away would find its way in there. At least it stays shut and I don't have to look at it.

Every the ultraminimalist needs a place to hide the chaos of daily life, I think.

I too have a double standard over my own organization and the organization in shared spaces.

I have a fair tolerance to multiple small messes in my apartment, yet, I become Martha Stewart on crack if I have to share spaces... I've learned to somewhat suppress the green monster, but sometimes a mess will make my eyes dilate and send my friends running in a frenzy jejeje...

In the words of Christina from Grey's Anatomy: "My apartment is messy, 'I' am not messy" jejeje

My one "dirty secret" is my laundry room. It's ground-level and vents directly outside, so it sucks in a lot of automotive dirt from the neighbors' cars. It's impossible to keep clean (believe me, I've tried), so I just keep the door shut.

Here's the answer to Fiona's contradiction:

Her conflict with her boyfriend isn't about neatness. It's about control.

The spouse's a minimalist, but treats my car like a garbage can. I'm not anal about the car, couldn't care less about dings etc,but its the hypocrisy I dislike.

I'm an organization fanatic, my partner is not...he will shove anything he doesn't want to see in the nearest corner behind anything. But my dark secret lies under the club chair...magazines, doodles, water colors who knows what's under there. At least it's a small area & not much else will fit & I do have to clear it out from time to time. Ditto on the car situation, I don't leave anything in my car, but good god there is so much freaking trash from my boyfriend it drives me nuts, & he expects ME to clean it out like it's my mess.

drawers in our house seem to always collect random what-nots, anything from tweezers, dice, notepads, medicine, money, nails, thumbtacks, everything. We have 1 junk drawer in the living room, 2 in the kitchen, I have 1 in my bedroom (if you don't count the closet) and we have a large den.

One of my roommates and I are moving to Seattle in a few months so we're going to empty out the den of most of the junk in there (including a rarely used exercise machine and a twin bed) and I am looking forward to cleaning out all those drawers.

As I am the "boyfriend" in this tale, I actually call Fionas purse something along the lines of a "sack of tetanus".

We rent a house, but the whole upstairs is sort of like a loft apartment.. open rooms flowing into one another. This is great for light, atmosphere, etc.. but stuff sort of finds its way all over the place as there is no real lines breaking up the laundry area from the office from the living area. (Hence the laundry in the crevasses of our couch)

Main problem is that I have a metric crapton of stuff from living alone in a 2 br, and then we moved from a 3br house to a smaller 2br... where the lack of space == mess-o-rama.
Imagine a pile of clothes in a football field vs a broom closet :)

Still trying to figure out how to best organize with one less room, and 2 large beds (one of which used to be in a separate guest room) Suggestions would be fantastico.