Today I decided to take a break from trying to unearth the guest room and instead moved on to a much more desirable task: organizing what is staying. One of the more stressful aspects of having clutter is that despite my current situation, I am an extremely organized, tidy person at heart! All the things, even the piles, must be organized or I feel deep unrest in every fiber of my being.
(There has been much unrest in the fibers.)
As I’m paring down and reducing my possessions, it is also time to start organizing what’s left. This is my happy place, yo. I love to categorize and organize! To do this I will be using some crystal clear acrylic bins that I found on amazon.com:
- Small boxes with dividers
- Large boxes with hinged lids
- Medium boxes with hinged lids (tall)
- Medium box with a hinged lid (short)
Oh I love them. I wanted something more lucite than tupperware. Normally I would use the plain white cardboard stuff at Ikea but guess who has a bunch of hidden clutter never again to see the light of day in those things already? Oh, hi.
Plastic works for me because I have found that even the most visually pleasing of cardboard boxes from Ikea and elsewhere immediately go into my out-of-sight-out-of-mind state. Once it is away in the box, it no longer exists. I also like the clear boxes better than cardboard because paper and cardboard attract silverfish. EWWWW. I know they are not lethal like spiders and ants but I hate them so much.
Organizing cuz it’s understood, organizing cuz it feels so good.
I love to carefully arrange my things in nice little boxes and put them on my shelves all lined up and it makes me feel calm and in control of my life. BUT FOR REAL PLEASE TELL ME WHO HAS TIME FOR THAT? This is one of the main reasons I am decluttering — so I have less stuff to carefully arrange and artfully agonize over.
So, you may click through and notice these boxes are kind of spendy. Because I do not want to sell a kidney to finance my habit, I only bought two each and one of the four packs which will be replacing about 20 assorted cardboard boxes. It was my reward for making my second big haul to the Goodwill. Seems counter intuitive, no? Buy stuff to hold stuff as a reward for getting rid of stuff!
I’m hopeful this will work out better for me because it’s clear (I can see the contents) and because they’re so expensive it naturally puts a limit on how much storage I can have. Better to have a few nice boxes of organized stuff than tons of inexpensive bins filled haphazardly with crap I don’t ever use.
I still have a ways to go on my guest room but just for now it was time for a break from all that and a little peek into my organized future. And maybe a little reward for all this slogging about in the dregs of items past.
