ASK SANTA TO BRING A CARPENTER (and where to take him shopping)

As a former closet designer, it is my duty to tell you a lot of clothes closets could use a kitchen designer, but a very experienced, truly innovative kitchen designer.  Maybe even better is shopping in a kitchen store.

Kitchen stores are a wonderland of gadgets and especially places to put things.  My last design department job was in a such a store.  There were interesting cabinets and shelves and gadgets that I could imagine in a wardrobe closet.

For example, I once did an attic wardrobe closet that had loads of floor space and not quite enough wall space for the shelves people had pictured.   But if I had worked in the kitchen design store first, I could have solved this with at least one of these . . .

Kitchen cabinet manufacturers now feature a magic "drawer" that is the world's tallest and skinniest.  It pulls out to reveal about six feet by three feet of shallow shelves on a backboard,  for skinny grinders or skillets too heavy to stack or platters or trays or whatever needs shallow, vertical space.

Think how many flats and loafers and driving shoes you could put in pockets on such a thing!  How many sandals!   Think how many scarves or belts (or neckties for Santa) would be easy to see and never get dusty!  Imagine never standing foolishly on a chair to reach the shoe boxes on the top shelf.  Never snagging a blouse as you reach to the back of a regular closet.

And where pull-out cutting boards are available, you could install one in a wardrobe cabinet to keep things neat as you choose the bottom sweater in the stack.  Or as a folding shelf.

You'll get some good ideas yourself.  The tough part is not spending your holiday money on a new kitchen instead of your wardrobe closet.

COMPUTER CLUTTER Another thing that helps clean out files

What are those little rectangles with arrows that pop up in a computer folder when you move your cursor to a particular title?  I think they may be called Tips.  Anyway, they tell the last date that I worked on something.  This can be a big help:

For instance:  One day over a year ago, someone taught me a new resume format for people who have been displaced by the recession.  I know the approximate date that happened in June, 2012.

When those little "tips" give me a date before late June of 2012, I'll compare that title with similar ones and probably push the earlier versions into the Recycle Bin pronto.

COMPUTER CLUTTER or What Have I Done?

I may have thousands of files - mostly Word.  And too many Excel files of expenses from last year.  (Just dumped those monthly ones as soon as I wrote that.)

What is helping me cut out the losers in Word?  I just compared two resumes side by side and saved the best one using a great technique from a free library computer class:

In Word, I can view two documents side by side by: pressing the little Microsoft flag key in the bottom row of my keyboard at the same time I press one of the direction arrow keys.  Then do the same for the other document and the other arrow key.

This way I can switch back and forth as many times as necessary, move good stuff, and delete the boring stuff until I have one good document to keep.

Expect another secret I use in the next post soon.

Train your bathroom to cut clutter

Why are all these towels on the floor?  Since I'm a Droppit, I'm practically an expert on why towels are on the floor.  My decorating jobs, however, fiercely motivated me to do something about the bathroom floor, the edge of the tub, and all other flat surfaces.

The thing about standard towel racks that seem to come with every bathroom wall is that the towel is hard to hang unless one actually FOLDS it.  Way too slow. And some of us have not mastered the art of nice folding.  Solution?  In one or more bathrooms, I've used towel rings--at least slightly forgiving, and at least the towel isn't on the floor.

HIGH SPEED solution?  If you can find them, good looking coat hooks, single or in sets, will catch the towel as one rushes past.  Certain family members may not notice these hooks unless clearly notified that the hooks are new and are for towels.

CAUTION:  Small children left unattended too long may attempt to hang other things like chairs or small siblings--even cats on the hooks, just to see what will happen.  But then, those are the same kids that tried to chin themselves on the old towel rods.

OPENING CONFESSION

Several years ago I was starting my book on clutter.  My friend Kristen said:  We want to hear more of your story. 

That seems only fair, right?  So here goes.  I'm getting ready to move.  Again.  A dear friend gave me a gift of a great room to live in for a year.  The year is ending.  I am moving to another state.   Not enough mostly yard-sale furniture for a moving van.  So me, suitcases, laptop, cane, and UPS.

When I moved out of my old apartment, my family helped me shred mountains of paper, altough I'd had a computer for years.  Now I'm still throowing away paper. It's been embarassing.   Research findings that never turned into writing.  Writing that never got finished, some of which is already in the computer.  Some of which went on two thumb drives when the desktop outfit finally died.  Total, not go-to-the-tech died.  And what to do with fistfuls of medical insurance reports and bank statements and ugh.

What's even more embarrassing is that I was regretting saying goodbye to my right-height "desk," and my two sorta good, lamps, the burl end table and some dishes.  But the one thing I will need most in my new room, is my 'posture" chair and the ottoman.  And I don't know how to get them to Texas.

Since I recently had spinal fusion, I can't roll my wonderful rolling file, or reach into the file drawers, or get things off the bottom shelf of the folding shelves.  But I want to whine anyway about giving them up.

 Then the internet intervened.  There is a video called something about a changed coastline on the eastern US.   Forever.  I didn't even watch the whole thing.  It's not too hard to guess what it's like to watch your entire home tip into the sea.  No dryout, no rebuild.  Nothing.

That put my lamp, and file drawers, and folding shelves into perspective right away.  Especially since I once lived six houses from the other ocean, and I grew up on stories of what even Lake Michigan can destroy.

And I was also reminded of an article on the web maybe a year ago. The reported was in another country interviewing a woman whose humble dwelling had been filled with muddy water in a flash flood.  Her family was dragging some soaked items up a hill to where they would try to camp.  She told the reporter that she thanked God for letting the flood in the daytime, for had it been at night, they would all have drowned.   

More later. . .