Time Tamer Tuesday - Schedule those Loads

Take advantage of the time delay features on dishwashers and washing machines to get chores done when hydro rates are low, but you're busy with more pressing matters -- like homework, bedtime, or reading a good book. 

Zoning

Zoning does not pertain to city planning alone. This term is often used by interior designers when trying to delineate functions within a multipurpose room; the same concept can be applied to organizing. And guess what, you’re doing it. You may not realize it, but you’re zoning.

Manufacturers of kitchen appliances and accessories make zoning suggestions. The presence of a dairy compartment, crisper drawers and meat drawer are examples of zoning. If you use a cutlery drawer insert to separate the knives, forks and spoons, you are following the principles of zoning. Whenever a large space has been divided into smaller spaces, each with an intended function, zoning has occurred.

To achieve order and improve efficiency throughout your kitchen, continue zoning. With assorted containers and a bit of analysis it can be done. The greatest challenge will likely be indentifying your zones. Try these on for size: snacks, breakfast foods, hot drinks. Then keep on going. All items that belong within a category should then be placed together on a shelf or in a container. There are no right or wrong categories. It’s just about you, the contents of your kitchen and how you and the people you reside with use the space.

What’s Lurking in Your Fridge?

A meeting with a colleague ran overtime on a Friday afternoon a couple weeks ago. As I dashed out the door I said, “I hope dinner’s ready when I get home”. Unfortunately, that’s not how it played out. I arrived home to discover our fridge sitting in the middle of the kitchen. Our four-year-old fridge had died.
We learned that General Electric (GE) had identified a defect with the motherboard. The only course of action was to replace the part. Ironically, our nearly-fifty-year-old GE fridge at the cottage is just fine. (Please don’t tell the energy police we have a fifty-year-old fridge.)
So we spent an hour shuttling the contents of our fridge to the overflow fridge in the basement. I also spent about 20 minutes emptying jars and bottles. I probably threw out $50 worth of sauces. Some were the mainstream grocery store items that I got tired of and never noticed were way beyond their Best Before date. But there were lots of dips and marinades purchased at trade shows, markets, or from independent grocers. These gems don’t have a BB date displayed.
It’s really worthwhile to check for a Best Before date as you take an item from your grocer’s shelf. Worst case scenario, check when you’re unpacking your groceries. If the manufacturer hasn’t suggested an expiration date, grab your permanent marker and write the purchase date on the container. Not all foods get green and fuzzy if left in the fridge too long. If you can reference your purchase date, you’ve got a good jumping off point to determine if the food in your fridge is safe.

25 Things to do Before Christmas - #13 Candles & #12 Silver

#13 Candles for the Season - If you use candles in your home, in the window or on your diner table, check to see of your supply will last the season. The red and green are notoriously hard to get at the local shops once December 23rd rolls around.

#14 Clean the Silver - Do you use good service during the holiday season? When was the last time you checked the condition of that service? Last December 27th when you put it away? Take a good lood and make sure it is presentatable for the company to whom you are serving it. Uh-oh! Need some spit and polish? Call a friend, mother in law, mother, sister to help out. Put on the tea kettle and most inspiring music you can find. Check out some of the easy cleaning suggestions. Here is a suggestion for cleaning silver with basic household cleaners: Clean Your Silver with Househole Basics

25 Things to do Before Christmas - #20 Baking, #19 Babysitters, #18 Cards

...and the list continues.


#20 - Organize your Baking. Are you doing any bakin this holiday season? Get your recipes out and pick the ones for this year. Now take out your calendar and book the day(s) that you will be baking. Check your pantry for ingredients and prepare your shopping list. Go back to the calendar and book in the time to shop.

#19 - Organize your Childcare. Do you have children home over the holiday season? Did you happen to notice that the kids are off school for a full two weeks (longer if you are in an independent school). Do you have activities prepared for the kids to do during the full two weeks or are they going to sit in front of the video games, computer or TV for two weeks straight. Are your working? Do you have adequate childcare or babysitting booked for the days that you are working or going out?

#18 - Organize you Christmas Cards. Many people have given up on holiday greeting cards. Other people have gone back to sending out this timely message of good cheer and greeting around the holiday season. By now you know the first step. That's right, get out your calendar and book the time to write them. Follow up by finding the cards from last year (or five years ago) that never got sent i.e. don't buy more until you have used up what you have! This is a great time to review your address book or contact file and update or clear it out.

Menu Planning Monday

A new wrinkle in our house: teenage daughter joins the swim team and now we have swim training 4 nights of the week. Note to menu plan - increase calories for first born. What's your new wrinkle? I know, I know - who says there was only 1 new wrinkle this week!?

Monday - Swim night - Fish, rice, salad, vegetables
Tuesday - Swim night - Pasta, salad
Wednesday - Swim night/choir night - Lentil caserole, salad
Thursday - Swim night/musical theatre night - BBQ chicken, potatoes, salad
Friday - Tacos with lettuce, cheese, vegetables and ground beef with home-made sauce

You may want to pop over to OrgJunkie, the originator of Menu Planning Monday and check out the menus.

The Last Frontier - Kitchen Shelf

As promised - here it is - a kitchen cupboard that refuses to be organized.

You can see that I have made previous attempts with this shelf. The challenge is that it is deep, pulls out but is at knee height. To really use the space effectively, I have to find tall containers to store the food that could then be labelled on top. That would make them easy to see, identify and ,hopefully, with the right size container, easy to access.

My strategy?

• Pull everything out and completely empty the shelf. (Clean it while empty).
• Assess what to keep and what to get rid of (don't use, don't need or is too old to keep).
• Determine from what is left how many containers I need.
• Get the containers. You may have your favourite source; one of mine is the Dollar Store. I have already determined a location to get the size and especially the height I need.
• Fill up the containers.
• Label.
• Put everything back. I will make everything fit the space I have as there isn't any other space i our 1970's renovated kitchen for these items. They have to live in the space available.

Stay tuned for the after pictures!

Last Frontiers - What's Yours?

You have to love Blogland as my friend Laura calls it. I can sit here in my office and find friends all over the world who are reading this. Welcome to my lastest discovery - we have friends in South Africa! You might want to take a look at Marcia's blog from the other side, and other end of the world.

Meanwhile, many of us who consider ourselves reasonably well organized - maybe not you but maybe someone you know - still have a corner of our lives that remains the Last Organizing Frontier. I have one cupboard in the kitchen that defies organization. It's going down next week. There, I've made a public statement. Stay tuned for the oh - so - revealing pictures.

Strategy for the really tough stuff: schedule, subdivide into bites, conquer.

What's your last frontier?

Lighten up your Closets - Warm up the City

OK folks, time to clear out the closets. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find as many unused coats in your closets as possible. Think of the space you could free up! Think of the warmth you could pass on to someone else!

Bob McGee from Toronto's CHFI FM radio station is, for the 5th year, collecting coats for children this weekend. Here is the link to the details where you can drop off the coats.

http://www.chfi.com/events/more.jsp?content=20081020_142107_26440


Let's make this a challenge. I'd like to see how many coats this blog can send out to Bob and friends to help keep the kids warm. Add your comments and tell me how many coats you are send up. I'll report the tally on Monday.

Client Questions - Strategies for Letting Go!

A client recently expressed the following frustration:

"I have too many casual-use dishes, and they are taking up a lot of space in my cupboards. But I can't bear to part with any of them. One set (of about eight) was given to me by my late mother and includes a set of casserole dishes, mugs, coffee pot, salt and pepper shakers, butter dish with cover, and so on. These are my favourite, but they're not microwave safe. The second set (of four) was given to me by my daughters when they were younger, one of the first gifts they bought for me with their own money. They're pretty, and I like the shape of the bowls, but some have broken so now there aren't enough. And they don't go with anything else I have. The third set are plain white, which is practical because I can use them to supplement my good china. All three sets came with cups and saucers, which I never use and would give away, but I don't like to separate them from the rest of the set. Do you have any suggestions for how to reclaim space in my cupboards?"

This is a classic expression of the frustration we all experience when objects pile up and emotional ties prevent us from letting them go. Here are some suggestions that might help you in this situation:

• If you like the objects, get them out of hiding and use them.
• Consider that your mother probably did not expect you to keep the dishes forever and would be very sad that you were experiencing so much stress over them. Who would she suggest that you give them to or what would she have liked you to do when you were finished with them?
• Move the dishes out of the cupboard and lay them out in a different room. Taking items out of context often helps the sorting/separating process by changing perspective.
• Play the strangers, acquaintances, friends game. Which of the dishes are friends and which are strangers? Send the strangers away.
• The emotional attachment in this case is not likely to the dishes, which are at the end of the day, just dishes you are not using. The attachment is to your mother and your daughters. Rather than keeping a cupboard full of dishes, pick one or two which serve as a representation of the love you have for them and send the rest away.
• Often by giving items which hold a strong emotional memory to someone or someplace of significance to us, the emotional attachment to the object can be diminished by the emotional experience of the giving. Are your daughters setting up their own homes yet? Could they use the dishes? Do you know a single mother who is struggling to make ends meet? Would she enjoy some lovely dishes? You get the picture.
• Take a picture! Get a friend or family member to take a picture of you using the dishes and with the entire set. In the case of the dishes your daughters gave you, have them in the picture too. You can now save the picture to remind you of the dishes and to elicit the same feelings of love for your family members without keeping all the objects.

Lunch Bag Let Down

It's back to school time. If you have children in elementary school who stay at the school for lunch, you have likely had at least on lunch bag go missing.

Today's tip is so simple and often repeated it will soon be wearing as thin as the nylon on my own favourite lunch bag. But it works:
Write your child's name on the Outside of the lunch bag.
Even if your own son or daughter can't remember to pick it up or doesn't notice it got left behind, chances are pretty good someone else will and the bag will make it back to the owner.

Client Questions - What do I do with this fondu pot?

We all have dishes, pots and perhaps many other items in our homes that we used seldom if ever. In this case, the client rarely if ever served fondu and now that her children were away at university, it seemed even less likely she would ever use it. The client was not interested in a garage sale and the pot contained enough sentimental value, that she wanted to find a new home where it would be used.

Sound familiar?

A helpful approach to shedding these objects is to ask yourself a) how often do I use it? b) how easily can I replace it or borrow another one if and when I do need it.

Ask around family or friends to see if anyone else would like a fondu pot or if they have family heading off to university or setting up a home that might like one. If they already have one, ask if you could borrow it from time to time.

Organizing Food in the Pantry

For many people, the pantry shelves represent the last frontier of organizing in the kitchen. Never was this more true that in my own kitchen, despite being in business for over 3 years as a professional organizer.

Organizing a pantry, often filled with half-full boxes of dry goods, is an exercise in matching up the right container with the right food stuff to fit in the right space. Remember those pre-school "fit the right shape into the right hole"? Here are some strategies to help you along:

• Rigid containers always store better than floppy bags. It doesn't matter whether you are purchasing food storage containers from a direct marketing distributor or the dollar store, consider repackaging your dry goods out of their original product bag into a rigid food storage container.
• Go vertical - often we loose valuable storage space by not using up the full height of a storage shelf. Try and fill up as much of the shelf height as possible. If necesary, consider investing in some additional shelf steps to turn a tall shelf into two shorter shelves.
• Label - no surprise here. Labels provide directed choice. It's like opening up the pantry and finding the road map with your route already marked to the wild rice or icing sugar.
• Buy only what you use - get rid of what you don't. If your family won't eat the whole wheat pasta no matter how many different versions of their favourite sauce you put on it - get rid of it. (Maybe the neighbour's children will eat it?). Your pantry space is valuable - don't use it to warehouse food you won't use.
• Group similar items together. If all the vinegar is organized together on the shelf, determing if you have any balsamic for the new salad dressing recipe is much easier.
• Enjoy! After your hard work of sorting, repackaging and organizing the food - plan a great meal for yourself and/or your family to celebrate all the great food you found in there!

Colour Your World

Colour can be a quick and easy way to organize anything from toys to files. When we organize we sort (small, medium, large widgets) pattern (like things together) and decide (keep, sell, toss). The same is true for storage and retrieval activity; looking for a spice (sort by alphabet?), filing paper (sort and pattern this year, last year, food, rent, utilities etc) and making decisions at every step.

Coloured boxes, baskets, labels or other storage tools provide an easy first sorting mechanism. Each child could be assigned a colour for their toys (John gets the blue toy bucket) sports gear (Jane's labels, bag and towel are blue) or items on the calendar.

It is helpful to limit the number of colours to a minimum of choices. Use colour for high level choices. For example, if you run a home based business, try using one colour to sort between business and personal files (business is blue, personal is green). Too many colour choices can increase organizing challenges especially for individuals who are easily distracted and have difficulty focussing.

Where is Everything - Spices?

Are all your spices in the same room?
If they are in the same room, are they on the same shelf/cupboard/drawer?
If they are on the same shelf/cupboard/drawer, do you have more then one container of any one spice?
Are there any contianers with expired best before dates?
Are the containers labelled with the name of the spice they contain?
Are they sorted by alphabet or type or frequency of use?
Do you use them or are they for decoration?

Pots and Water Vessels

We live in a “mature” residential in Toronto. Translation: the water pipes are old and the community has had four water pipes break in as many months. Today was our street’s turn and by 7 am neighbours were out trying to unplug the leaves from the sewer covers as the street flooded with water. By 4:30 pm a knock on our door heralded the arrival of the works truck with the news that there were 34 broken mains in the city today and the water would be off from 5 pm for 4 to 5 hours. Perfect timing; right through arsenic hour for those with kids.

Like everyone else on the block I filled the tub and all the pots I could manage and was left wishing I had more, and bigger, pots to fill. No, I reminded myself, then I would have more pots to look after, manager, store, sort etc. It occurred to me that too many cooking pots is not an indulgence I often come across with my clients. Other kitchen indulgences like pot holders, towels, spices, knives and the like are often a challenge in calming and decluttering a kitchen but pots have not yet surfaced as a collectable. Perhaps some of you have a difference experience. I’d love to hear from anyone who struggles to manage their pot collection and what their issues might be.