Planes, Trains, Automobiles…and Your House: Organizing Small Spaces

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Small-space Usage Plan

This week’s assignment is to evaluate a small-space organizing challenge and start planning a solution:

• Identify your toughest small-space decluttering or organizing challenge? Typically, this is the area of your home with the highest ratio of contents to capacity, but it could be any space that’s unreasonably small for your current needs.
• Pull everything out of the space in question, eliminating anything that you’re ready to discard, donate, give away, or relocate to a more appropriate spot elsewhere in your home.
• Consider removing existing shelves, racks, rods, partitions, etc., that impede your ability to make the best use of the space in its current form.
• Reflect on ready-made or custom solutions that could replace any existing storage elements and decide what kind of budget you’re willing to provide for the project.
• Take measurements to get a sense of how many containers of what size(s) might help you manage the contents that go back into the space.
• Visit the web site for Container Store, Ikea, or any other outlet for organizing and storage solutions to get a sense of what’s available that might help your address your small-space challenge.
• Make a plan for your revamped small space. Include simple sketches, measurements, and notes about containers and other solutions that plan to use.
• If you’re ready to act on your solution, schedule a time soon to get to work! If you’re not there yet, put the contents back into the space to the best of your ability until you’re ready to move forward.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.