Lets face it, when you want to lose weight, you have to eat less, unless, of course, you get your stomach stapled. So why do people still believe that by “organizing” better and buying more “organizing paraphernalia” they are going to somehow miraculously get the thin, trim apartment that they really want? Perhaps we should advertise apartment tummy stapling (but isn't this what studios already are?).
This is the load of bs that, unfortunately, stores such as Hold Everything, and The Container Store capitalize on and we unwittingly buy into.
If you buy more shelves and boxes and fit more in, you are going to have a more organized, but fatter and heavier apartment. It is like eating more cake and then wearing the right clothes so that no one notices your size. And the net result is that you are only dampening the stress and frustration you already feel trying to juggle too much stuff. I give your "new" home 12 months before it explodes again...
Every inch of bandwidth and floorspace in our economy is aimed at convincing us to buy more stuff, and we are losing. We have more stuff, they have our money. We are stressed out and feeling as if we can’t keep ahead of our life. Shouldn’t this tell us something?
Two separate clients in the past two days have said to me that their favorite store is Hold Everything, because it is so calm and organized. IT IS CALM AND ORGANIZED BECAUSE IT IS NEARLY EMPTY AND NO ONE LIVES THERE. It is a store that sells designer emptiness, for chrissakes, like a leather belt to hold in your gut or a slimming bra. 
Right on. I've been slowly giving away my clothes to the local church over the last few months, and it's great. In mine line of work I can't get rid of any of my books--but, books can be beautiful, I suppose, and I do use them.
Hold Everything.
My next step (I hope) is to get rid of, or somehow hide, my television. I don't love owning it, but I do love watching rented movies; I wish I could find a small TV armoire that didn't cost $700 like the one at
So well said! My parents don't/can't throw anything away. We haven't seen the surface of the dining room table since before I left for college in 1986. I'm sure much of my "I haven't used it in a year, it goes" personality is a reaction to growing up in that overstuffed house. I feel physically anxious and nervous everytime I go there and see more stuff stuff stuff.
I have found the website www.flylady.com a source of real inspiration in ridding myself of baggage. It is a little (OK, a lot) over-the-top, and sometimes grating, but there is really useful stuff there too. I find myself repeating the fly mantra all the time--"You can't clean clutter." My sister calls Flylady my cleaning cult. But she's doing it. And her boss is now doing it...and my living space is less cluttered, much calmer, and definitely cleaner these days.
Were you a monk in another lifetime? Letting go of "stuff" is integral to so many spiritual philosophies. I wish I were better at it. In the last couple years the piles of stuff in my studio seems to have grown expotentially and I just never seem to have enough time to spend in my apartment to make any progress. I do a little and by the next time I get back to the chore there is three times as much "stuff".
For a good look at how people live creatively in very small spaces with a lot of stuff, free of the organizing fetish, check out the small photo book "Tokyo - A Certain Style." Its just shot after shot of cluttered but somehow funky and fun Tokyo apartment interiors, with insightful captions. Indispensable!
The line "BECAUSE... NOBODY LIVES THERE" made me laugh out loud.
Overall, an interesting and astute take on the probelm at hand.
Easier said than done, though, this business of paring down. I've found one of my biggest obstacles, especially in cramped quarters, is the whole reality of "it will get worse before it gets better"... a packed, disorganized closet can still be shut tight, out of sight. To tackle that closet and get it down to Zen minimalism means that, while in progress, your cramped apartment will look more like a bomb went off and even crappier than when you started (albeit short-term, I know). But tackling it is REALLY intimidating, even IF you've already managed to divorce yourself from the personal meaning and emotional ties to the stuff you're trying to chuck out.
I completely agree with Patrick. There are probably a few areas in my apartment that don't get as organized as they should for the simple facts that:
1) I know it will take MUCH longer than I plan
2) There is no extra space to do it in
A small example - the last few months I have been trying to purge a very large PEZ collection. But if they aren't in the box in the closet, there is no good place to have them! No matter what - they are in the way. And of course, if they are in the box in the closet, I forget about them!
Maxwell you've really inspired me this month. I'm now in the process of getting the clothes I wear regularly altered so that they fit perfectly. Once done, I'm cleaning out all my "I sort of like them" clothes and sticking with the stuff I really love. Once it's complete I have so much more empty space and my clothes will stay in better condition since they won't be jam packed in my closet.
As for organizing clutter, I saw some show on BBC America this weekend where this British woman had her house perfectly organized and labelled but she was just holding on to 30 years of bad memories. The end was great since she purged all the bad memories and junk and just kept a few cherished items.
Having just downsized to move from a 3 story townhouse in DC to a two-bedroom apartment in NYC, I have just gotten rid of a lot of stuff (clothes, books, various broken things never fixed, etc.). And I am thrilled to have done it.
That said, I have to defend the porn of Hold Everything, Container Store, and REAL SIMPLE. While certainly people are stuffing the items in those stores with stuff that they don't need, it is true that some of the storage solutions are pretty ingenious and useful. And Real Simple has really helped me organize paper files ...
I've been doing a lot of organising and purging in the last year. I finally moved into my first "big kid" apartment -- just me and the cat. I suspect that I've been purging and organizing because I don't have the money to really decorate yet but still want to nest and generally be happy here. Getting rid of clothes that don't fit and kitchen gadgets I don't need has been great -- a lot of them were hand-me-downs from roommates or junk my mom bought "to help me out". I've also listed a lot of my older books on amazon, which has lightened the load on my overstuffed bookshelves.
Once you really loook at the things you own, you realise that you don't need as many of them. I don't realisticially think that my house is going to look like some decorator's showcase, but I do expect myself to be cleaner and tidier than I was a few years ago. I check in on flylady every-so-often, but her advice is usually pitched at homemakers in traditional homes, where I live and work in a tiny little studio. "Clean Sweep" is another good influence on me. Nothing makes me feel better about my almost-okay tiny apartment than watching people from the suburbs get into super clutter trouble over files and "collections" and their scrapbooking hobbies.
As for the woman with the TV/armoire issue -- if you're not using your TV for TV, consider junking it in favor of some alternative way to watch DVDs... Have you considered buying a portable DVD player or watching a DVD on a laptop? It's not so good for date night, but you eliminate all those wires and the general TV mess. I own one and watch movies with the player propped up on my bed or sitting on my lap at night. They're expensive, but they're cheaper than that fancy cabinet at Hold Everything and can fit in your night stand drawer.
To Josh looking for a television solution...I don't personally own a tv, but I saw a great video-watching solution at a friend's apartment. They had hung up a projector screen and were using a projector, to which you can hook up a dvd player, computer, whatever. It can easily be disguised and takes up less space than a TV. In lieu of the screen, you can also simply paint your wall "projector white" which will make any wall a projection surface. I'm pretty sure Janovic has this paint.
Good luck!