Mensajes

As I pointed out to my mom recently, it’s sort of ironic that the covers of all of the January home magazines are about cutting clutter and getting organized, since they immediately follow Christmas, a time in which we inevitably accumulate more stuff. People in the know agree – the National Association of Professional Organizers dubbed January “Get Organized Month.” (the rest of the year? crap everywhere!) Which isn’t to say I don’t love the gifts and Christmas and all, but it speaks to this weird confusion about what we really want. In my case, I keep buying more storage containers, am convinced that living closer to an IKEA would lead to more general storage serenity in my life, and yet I know, deep down, that the real answer isn’t storage – it’s a deep purge of junk I have and don’t need or use.

Well, and a bigger living space would be nice, too.

I started planning a garage sale last spring, a garage sale which didn’t quite materialize when I was working every Saturday over the summer (oops). But one of the perks of my (very) small apartment is the use of a small storage room in the basement, so I’m doing my best to move things into boxes in the basement, ready for a spring 2010 garage sale, followed by a trip to Goodwill. I even bought garage sale stickers, so as I find something that I don’t use or honestly, don’t really even like, I can label it, price it, put it in a box by the door, and take it down to the basement storage. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will make the sale a little bit easier to manage and will motivate me to take some action and not just move all of this stuff all over again.

One of the organizational tools I’ve become somewhat obsessed with lately, maybe because it’s so damn cold outside and that’s accompanied by a whole slew of outerwear, is a coat tree. They are sort of old fashioned and I used to think sort of weird, but I just don’t feel like drilling any more holes in the plaster walls of my place, and there’s a perfect little alcove behind the front door. Our coats are slung over the back of the couch, piled outside my bedroom, hung on the back of the dining room chairs. They are everywhere, and most mornings, in my hurried haze to get to work by 8 a.m., I’m also looking for my hat and gloves. Not my keys or my cell phone – I’ve figured out how to put those in a place I can remember (most of the time) – but these seasonal accoutrements that I hate myself for forgetting when I’m walking to work and it’s 2 degrees, like most of last week.

Here are some coat trees I’ve found that I don’t hate. Think I might try to hit a couple of thrift stores this weekend, see what I can uncover.

(just kidding)

from CB2, Target, IKEA, KMart, Home Decorators, respectively.