Organizing books talk about “using vertical space”, and adding various items of furniture to give you more place to put your things. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, for the right sort of person.
For other people though, that extra vertical space and those extra flat surfaces trigger a different mentality – “I have space, so I can fill it”.
If you’re finding yourself with stuff piled on flat surfaces all around your house, you’ll obviously have to deal with the stuff that’s currently there. And after that, you may want to reconsider whether you want to have as many tempting “places to pile”.
Consider an example.
You have a little table next to the door. You thought it would make a good place to toss your keys, and set a few small items. Maybe some mail you were bringing in, maybe some gloves in the wintertime, etc. But now the table is absolutely overrun with piles and piles of mail, and misc. other things buried in the pile.
Consider the intended use for the space. Maybe you got sick of losing your keys, so you wanted a place to put keys that’s right by the door. And you don’t have a pre-defined place for mail to go, so you thought maybe having a place to put it by the door wouldn’t be a horrible idea. That’s how you got here in the first place.
Consider whether your proposed solution is solving the problem. A flat surface seems to be accumulating tons of misc. things, not just the mail and keys you were originally hoping to put there. Your keys don’t even go next to the door anymore, because if you put them on the pile of stuff they’ll get buried.
Then finally, consider whether or not there might be a better way to solve the problem. Keys have the advantage that they can go on a wall hook, and a wall hook is hard for other things to end up on. Maybe a set of wall hooks – one for each member of the family that has keys – might be a good idea. Talk it over with your family. And for the mail, rather than one big random pile for everybody to go through, maybe having a small file sorter on the wall – with one pocket for each member of the family – would encourage the proper sorting and distribution of mail.
In other words, rather than having a big, amorphous undefined space, you’ll be working with the other people in the home to define your space in a way that makes it less likely for it to be used incorrectly.
Of course this doesn’t completely solve the problem of “we like to pile things on flat surfaces” – but it does corral that problem to fewer areas, which generally means that your clutter can’t get nearly as out-of-control before you find yourself having to deal with it.
And speaking of “dealing with it”, if the above describes you, the odds are really good that you have a fair bit of accumulated junk that you need to get rid of. No matter what it is, we’re the local junk removal company with the solution to your problem. Just give us a call, point at the stuff that needs to go, and we’ll make it disappear fast. Get a jump start on a clean, organized space – call us today!