Especially if you have a lot of crafting supplies.
I’m struggling with a lot of fabric, yarn, and various random wooden things I paint. I have a single bedroom apartment and there’s so much stuff that some of it is on the floor.
(assuming you rent) you can use command strips to stick organisers to your walls and use vertical space. You can use some of those stationery organisers and stick it to the wall. In general see if you can use more vertical space.
Honestly I’ve started really evaluating if I’ll ever actually do whatever project the supplies are for and if not getting rid of them (donate, sell, whatever, varies by item).
Will I actually use that piece of scrap? Will I really ever make that thing? Am I ever honestly going to reach for that color/texture? I’ve probably cut my supplies in half doing this, got a few local people into oodworking by parsing things out, and they got to learn on my rejects that cost basically nothing to them. Now I can actually see what I’ve got and do things.
Do you mean physically or inventory?
Physically. Inventory would be smart, to stop me from buying shit I already have, but I’m worried that my apartment is in the early stages of something from Hoarders.
Other complication right now is that I’m still recovering from surgery - standing for fifteen minutes fatigues me and bending over is painful. It sucks, because I had taken off a week for cleaning at the end of last month and spent all of it in bed sick with the thing that sent me to the hospital.
If you’re not a stranger to docker, you can run something called homebox.
https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox
I use it for my home inventory and insurance.
Especially since you’re on a low physical activity recovery time, this is the perfect time to deploy and start to look at receipts and locations.
70% of the work is administrative that you can do sitting down. You’ll go through your emails or receipts and start scanning and inventory them.
Or you can just look at labels to look at how you want to organize everything. A solid inventory base is better in the long run, just takes a lot of effort to get started.
Physically I use stackable crates to organize everything, I use Hay crates, but many other manufacturers do the same thing.
Ok, just STOP.
Needed to be said. Take your time to recover - this other stuff can wait. You can spend time considering stuff, thinking about how to better manage your space and time, but don’t try to do anything right now.
I know, that’s hard to do (I’m a hypocrite about this, for sure) but it’s tough advice we all need (myself the most).
You in the States?
Start looking around for milk crates. They stack.
They don’t have milk crates in other countries? How do food service workers take smoke breaks?
They don’t.
Clear Plastic shoe storage boxes and a label maker. Then for any bigger boxes that are not clear. Label the box and log items in my self hosted asset manager and scan the QR code to list the items in that box.
I put things in in storage areas where I think I will remember where they are, then spend 3 days looking for it tearing the house apart when I actually want to use them. Then by the time I finally find them all ambition to do the project is gone so I put it back till I’m ready again. Process repeats.
IKEA Kallax with a combination of insets of drawers and doors and boxes that fit my particular needs. They are cheap and easy to assemble and weigh next to nothing because they are made of some kind of pressed cardboard material but they still look quite all right.
Clear boxes
My shit? It all goes in the toilet. Never really a problem with organization.
Having less stuff is my main method.
Everything goes into T H E D R A W E R.
I know people that store smaller items in fishhook storage boxes. Like briefcases with a lot of small compartments
What does this word “organized” mean? Like…you can find things quickly and efficiently? You don’t lose things after you put them down?
That doesn’t sound right. I’m nearly 40 and I’ve never seen such a thing! It’s a myth!
I was asking myself this about the big cable box. I have a large box containing a wide assortment of cables. Cables I acquired over a long career. So many cables, that they have become a nightmare for people like me, searching for a specific cable. Does anybody have ideas how to fix this?
Buy some cable ties. 100 for five bucks from Amazon. Tie up all your cables. Boom, rat’s nest gone. If you wanna be fancy, sort the cables into boxes or bags by type. An hour’s work, no hassle again, ever.
“Leave it a little better than you found it.”
There is no grand system, no master organization that can’t be defeated by just junking everything away.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Take 5 minutes at the beginning and end of each session to make your space a touch better. That’s how you “keep” things in order.
