A Confession

Even the organizer get disorganized!

As evidenced by the photos below, I allowed the storage area of our basement to get out of hand. I generally try to keep up, but living with 3 other people and by convincing myself that I was too busy (really unmotivated), this is what happened over the summer:

Boxes piled up, some empty, some filled with legitimately stored items, no access to the shelves. What a mess!

Well, now things have calmed down a bit in my work schedule and I took advantage of some time off from substituting in our school district. I sorted, I threw out, I decided to recycle a lot of corrugated cardboard and I purchased two small, clear, storage bins ( I will touch more on that later) and now have back a clean, easily accessible storage area:

I store all of my seasonal decorations in the colored bins. And yes, even those bins are organized on the inside! Each is labeled, and in the case of multiple bins for one holiday or season, they are very specifically labeled with their contents. For example, when I begin decorating for Christmas, I start with the outdoor lights and garland. I know exactly which bins contain the lights, another has the garland. They are also stacked in the order I will take them down. Otherwise, with as many bins as I have, I would be constantly moving bins around in order to get to the one I want.

The clear bins I purchased to replace a couple of cardboard boxes were a deliberate purchase. I have consumables in each bin. I can take a quick peek to see if anything needs to be replaced. A small one contains bows for packages; a larger one for tissue paper, gift bags, ribbon, etc.

On the lower shelves, I have a clear bin and an orange bin. Each of these (one for each daughter) contains the projects and some schoolwork that our girls have done since they first picked up a crayon or a gluestick. I have sorted through them in the past, but the next time I do so, I intend to create a scrapbook (or scrapbooks) of some of the smaller projects and take photos of some of the larger, bulkier ones. I will keep you posted on my progress.

Not counting the time I took to drive to the recycling center with the cardboard and the store for the bins, total time for this reorganization project was approximately 3.5 hours.