Go home!!
Hi everyone! I promise I’m not yelling at all of you to go home, I’m yelling at all the stuff in my house. I’ve been trying to slowly get the house back in order since the holidays, and I just can’t seem to complete the task because I don’t know where to put everything and it’s SO frustrating! I know I need to assign everything a home but I’ve been totally frozen and just can’t make it happen.
I bought a cheap cabinet from Walmart last week and thought it was going to solve all of my problems. I spent about six or seven painstaking hours trying to put it together over a period of three nights (the instructions said it should only take about an hour, however, all the damn pre-made holes weren’t drilled deep enough…surprise surprise, and I spent way too long trying to force the screws in and stripping my screwdrivers before finally using the power drill to fix the holes myself, all to then finally get to one of the last steps of putting the stupid back piece on and discovering that they didn’t line the holes up properly for that piece to be attached correctly either). UGH
Side note: Some of you may have been very surprised to read that last part where I said I used a power tool myself. I know, it’s pretty crazy to me too. I recently learned how to use it though and I feel like it has opened up a world of DIY possibilities for me now. I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty proud of myself for figuring it out too (thanks YouTube!) Okay, unnecessary brag over.
Anyway, I’m sure you can imagine how incredibly frustrating the cabinet ordeal was. The only good thing is that what took six hours to put together only took about twenty minutes to take apart and get back in the box to return it. So anyway, my cabinet that was supposed to fix all my space problems is a no go, and I’ve since been scouring Facebook Marketplace for an alternative option and also found myself about to panic order a bunch of big baskets from Target.
I somehow forced myself to close the tab before checking out online and impulse buying multiple baskets (though I didn’t clear the cart, so any second now I can hit that “buy now” button and it’s taking everything in me not to push it). I’m recalling Cas’s words from Clutterbug along with multiple other decluttering experts I follow though who all advise that buying containers isn’t always the answer. It feels like it should be, and let’s be honest, I probably will still end up with at least one new basket in the next week or two, but I am forcing myself to assign homes first, and then if I’ve figured out where things best belong, I will then go ahead and get that beautiful basket I’ve been eyeing.
As if the universe knew I needed more convincing that the best way to get organized is to find “homes” for things rather than buying more, as I’m brushing my daughter’s hair yesterday morning before school she casually mentioned to me “I found my ballet shoes, they were in my bag”. What?!? Imagine my hand freezing mid-brush and me trying to wrap my brain around this…Okay, let me rewind here and start from the beginning. Shortly before Christmas when we got home from dance class one day, I realized my daughter’s ballet shoes weren’t in her bag. I was really surprised because this has never happened before. So the next week we went to class I checked the lost and found and asked her teacher if she’d seen them. She said no but she said she was sure she saw her with them so it is so weird how they disappeared. She even went so far as asking the other girls in the class to check their bags in case they’d accidentally put her shoes in there. No luck with any of those attempts. We decide to wait one more week to see if they happen to show up in the lost and found (and my daughter goes barefoot two weeks in a row for class…), then I finally give up and order a new pair of ballet flats for her.
Fast forward now to me trying to comprehend how her shoes suddenly appeared in her bag that I had checked myself already 20 or so times. After checking and clarifying that she’s referring to her old shoes, and not the new pair we just bought, and she confirms that yes, her old pair were in her dance bag, in a “different part”. So, I immediately drop the brush and go to check in her bag and see that yes, they are in fact in there, they are just in a totally different pocket than the ones we have always put them in. Insert face palm emoji here. It literally never occurred to me to check every single pocket in the bag because we always put them in the exact same spot, and the shoes are so little that they didn’t make a big bump or anything noticeable to draw attention to the fact that they were crammed into this tiny little pocket that I’m pretty sure is not meant to hold shoes (I say pretty sure and not definitely because I am the least knowledgeable person about anything related to dance, and I also had no clue originally that the pocket that actually is meant for the shoes was what is was, so…I could very well be wrong, and there’s potential that one of her instructors put them in there, and they would know better than me where they belong), but regardless, the point is, it’s not where I had decided the home for the shoes was.
So moral of the story is, not only do things all need a home, but everyone has to be on the same page and put things in their proper home or else the system totally fails. The silver lining here is, I got her new shoes on a really good sale so they weren’t expensive, and they actually are better than her original pair because they have elastic bands instead of an annoying tiny little string like her old pair that always came undone anyway, so, although I can’t believe how it happened, I’m glad we ended up buying her a new pair. Lesson learned though…I will check ALL pockets in bags when things are missing.
And to finally nail down the importance of finding proper homes for things, as I write this I am literally staring at my new purse that I just bought (I know that sounds hypocritical when I just said buying more things isn’t the answer, but my old one was literally ripped so this was necessary) and as I try to make the switch and take everything from my old purse and put it into the new one, I am almost paralyzed with indecision as to where to put things. I don’t want to just throw things in haphazardly and then have all chaos break loose moving forward (even though honestly within a week or two we all know it’s going to be a chaotic mess in there either way), but they of course don’t line up exactly the same in terms of how many side pockets they have, etc. so it’s not a one to one trade and I am feeling so stuck. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s like, you don’t want to start off on the wrong foot and have it be messy from the start, you want to at least go in with a clean slate.
Anyway, that’s not a big deal, I’ll get through this (totally joking here I swear, I’m not actually upset about this, just taking a little longer to get it emptied than I thought it would). But this is making me think about the house and how I am going to have to just DO IT. I’ve been a bit paralyzed in getting things organized again because I’ve been worried about putting things in the wrong spot or choosing a system that doesn’t end up working out the way I’d envisioned, but as I sit here thinking about it, so what if I do?! What’s gonna happen, the house will be messy? HA. Already is. And it’s not like the homes things have now are the right spot (ahem like our dining room table), so just pick a place and go with it for now and if it doesn’t work we’ll try a new spot.
So there’s the plan. And for anyone else who needed a gentle reminder to just do it and stop overthinking, I hope this helped you too. Go assign homes to things, and also make sure the entire family knows the homes or else you’ll be like me and back on Amazon replacing items that you actually still have but just can’t find.
Good luck with your organizing!