If I had to list one explicit goal I'd like to accomplish in my clutter clean-up, it this: get everything off the floor!
Here's a quote from good ol' Don Aslett's book Clutter's Last Stand. It's actually just meant to refer to the floor spaces in closets, but I think it applies to floors in general:
Get stuff off the floor. Floor mess is about the most psychologically devastating of all messes. Most closets have a lot of unused upper room. A few dollars worth of material and a spare hour or two and you can install (or barter with a friend to install) a second of third shelf above the one over the hanger rod. This makes more room for worthwhile keepables.
I have a habit of leaving DVDs and CDs lying around in stacks around the couch or entertainment center. The sad thing is, I do in fact have the shelf space. It's just a matter of getting into the good habit of putting stuff back when I'm done. That's always been a problem for me. Today I walked around the living room and picked up about 30 DVDs from the floor. Then I went a few steps further.
I've had a rack of 50 or 60 VHS tapes sitting in my living room (you can in fact see part of it in the banner photo above, behind the first "F"). They're all home recorded stuff, and last spring I spent a week or two converting it all to DVD-R. But instead of throwing them right into the trash, I've been meaning to recycle them since I heard VHS is one of those physical media that could be "hazardous" when carelessly trashed in bulk. I found a box in my kitchen that other boxes were resting on, but itself was empty. I moved the tapes into the box and stowed that away for later (though hopefully not TOO much later). Then I moved a box near my living room window that had no immediate use, and stuck that in another room. In its place, I put the VHS rack and filled it with the DVDs I had lying around.
So in one job, I managed to 1) get rid of another box sitting around in my kitchen, 2) move a box in my living room that I didn't need immediate access to, 3) moved the VHS tapes to their own box for later recycling, 4) freed up a rack I could use for DVDs, 5) stuck that in the convenient spot and filled it with the DVDs.
What did we learn today?
- If you have a box of stuff that doesn't need frequent access, then there's no need to keep it within arm's reach in the living room.
- When dejunking your home, you can often kill 2 or more birds with 1 stone.
- Multi-media shelves are pretty handy. They can hold any combination of DVDs, CDs, VHS, etc. These are usually better than racks that have slots for the cases, because you can fit a bigger variety of stuff, and it's easy to reorder things without having to take cases out of the slots one at a time to move things further down.
- Get the crap off the floor!
