Teleidoscope

Wed, Jan 23, 2008

Clutter

Posted at 10:21 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The folks at Making Light are talking about de-cluttering one's life and environment.

There is no way to de-clutter my house in absolute terms: I own about five times as many books and DVDs as I have proper shelf space for. And about one and a half to two times as many as I can cram into my bookshelves if I take maximum advantage of the volume available. A twelve inch deep shelf will hold three rows of paperbacks, with more laid across the tops of the rows up to the shelf above.

A 10 inch shelf will hold three rows of paperbacks if you pack them really solid....

However, I have made some progress at decluttering spaces that were becoming unusable.

The weight bench has been disinterred and is now usable.

My kitchen cupboards are gradually becoming organized (I gave my cleaning ladies some kitchen stuff today, including a cast iron griddle I never use and my old rice cooker, also seldom used because it is not smart enough to handle the altitude.

The rice cooker (from Costco) came with extra steamer trays, though so the ladies can use it for tamales and such. Tamales are not part of my culinary heritage. And the new smart rice cooker that knows how to handle the altitude also has a steamer tray that is more than sufficient for one person quantities. For that matter, most stock pots and spaghetti pots come with steamer inserts these days: if I ever needed to steam a lot of stuff at once, I could do some batches on the stovetop... on multiple burners.

I have a kitchen cart that lives in my dining room and provides an extra drawer and some cupboard space. When I got home from Boston the first time (the week before my surgery in 2005) some books got unpacked onto the top of the cart and have not moved until this week.
Now they are on a bookshelf that was cleared along with the weight bench excavation. And my pretty new Mario Batali pots, which are really too large for my cupboards, are sitting on the cart top being decorative.

Since the ladies were coming today, I also managed to beat back the tsunami of books and paper that was trying to engulf the coffee table. But that is mostly cheating: the papers got moved to the dining room table, where they still need to be sorted and either filed or discarded. Maybe I'll clear some tabletop when I work on my taxes...most of the papers I need are somewhere in that pile, but a couple have not arrived yet.

The books got added to the pile filling the wingback chair, which is going to collapse under the weight one of these days. The side tables in the living room are also buried a couple of feet deep under books and DVDs...

Besides the papers in the dining room, the next candidates for de-cluttering are:

The baker's rack that holds my flour canisters, two shelves of cookbooks and one shelf of miscellaneous stuff. The cookbooks need a bigger chunk of that third shelf, and all the little booklets that came with various gadgets (which make up a fair amount of the 'miscellaneous') desperately need to be sorted and organized.

The lower corner cabinet in my kitchen needs more work, though clearing out the rice cooker helps.

Visible nonbook clutter in the bedroom (minor) and the computer room/study (ack)

Closets, which are mostly stuffed. Clearing stuff out of the closets would free up space for other stuff to migrate into.

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