Ordering Disorder
with Busy Mom
When you have kids, the battle between order and chaos at home can take place on many fronts. Ordering Disorder is about ways to fight domestic entropy with organizing tips, tricks, meal ideas and more.
To learn more about Elizabeth, visit Busy Mom Blog or check out her Work It, Mom! profile.
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The past couple of posts have been around and about my kitchen. I talked about making school lunches, and shared my coffee mug problem.
I didn’t really intend to keep talking about the kitchen until I was trying to cook dinner, and opened the spice cabinet to this:
While I’m fortunate to have a space dedicated to these types of things, this is one area that my family cannot seem to understand is arranged with a purpose. If you take something out of there, why not put it back where you got it?
Contrary to popular belief, the items in there aren’t randomly placed.
The bottom shelf is supposed to be cooking items such as spices (on the turntable thingy), cooking sprays, cooking wine, envelope mixes, etc.
The middle shelf is supposed to be baking items, syrups, cocoa, cookie decorating, food coloring and such, and the top shelf is larger items I keep on hand for emergency bake sale situations and the occasional pumpkin pie (a family favorite).
I was tired of looking at it and trying to work around it, so I got up there and started putting it in order. I began by taking everything off the top shelf, and found (wait for it…) more coffee mugs.
I threw out expired things, and unidentified objects in plastic bags. I got rid of stuff that was possibly older than my oldest kid, and put like things together.
This was monumental for me since usually, when I’m confronted with the need to clean out or rearrange an area, my perfectionism paralysis takes over and I don’t do anything because I feel like it’s not worth it if I don’t have time to do it exactly right and in detail.
This time, I fought the urge to put it on the calendar and I just took a few minutes and did it. It turned out pretty well (or, better, at least):
I need to get better at “just doing it” (as opposed to scheduling and planning a “good” time) when a mess needs to be tackled, but I’m working on it.
Are you like me, do you have trouble starting projects unless all conditions are “perfect”? What area in your house would you get under control if you had a few minutes?
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This is actually on my to-do list, this week (so, great timing) also, taking a lesson here and learning to, you know, “just do it”. Funny they should call those Lazy Susans
Liz | September 27th, 2011 at 11:35 am
I’m trying to work on “just doing it” in the few minutes that I have. Deep cleaning my living room is one of those things. It would take about 2 full days to do the whole thing correctly but I have to give myself permission to do it a little at a time or it’s NEVER going to get done.
Headless Mom | September 27th, 2011 at 1:40 pm
The shorter answer would be what area of my house doesn’t need to be brought under control and that would be…Nope. It all needs work.
Cy | September 27th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
I have a different problem. When I see something that needs cleaned out I just start doing it right there on the spot. The trouble is that I do this when I am already in the middle of something else and then I get tunnel vision and forget all about what I was doing before. This can (okay, HAS) include things like cooking dinner and suddenly needing to clean out the spice cabinet, forgetting about dinner, or going in to take a shower and reorganizing the bathroom closet. Most of the time, I don’t have time to finish the job and that’s really the worst part of it. For instance, I’ll empty the entire spice cabinet, toss what needs tossed and then realize that I’m late getting the kids from school. Now I’m left with the entire contents of the cabinet out on the counter. Never fails.
vegas710 | September 28th, 2011 at 7:28 pm
Oh man. You have just described me and my ‘office situation’. My kids started school 2.5 weeks ago, the youngest starting full-time for the first time. After 6 years of kids at home, people asked ‘what are you going to do with All That Time?! (implying that I was going to sit at home and eat bonbons, perhaps?!). As my husband works in a different country during the week (and weekends this coming fall break, but we won’t talk about THAT!), I usually have plenty to keep me out of mischief, effectively being a single parent during the majority of the week. But I blithely said “oh, well I am going to sort out the office and paint the inside of the house”.
Like heck I have. The office is such a big job (job, not room - it is a small closet, enough room for a desk, table and bookshelf). But I am paralysed by the need to do it “perfectly”. To have THE BEST office management system suddenly materialise out of the piles of paper and **** that has been dumped in there over the course of the 6.5 years we have lived here… 6 of those with infants or preschoolers. It is the only room with a lock, so every confiscated or broken toy, gift, future gift, unwanted gift, school paper, art supply, treasured drawing, bill and piece of mail… well, it’s in there somewhere.
Help?!
Jen | October 1st, 2011 at 3:22 am
ARGG! I know exactly how you feel. I have the same problem every time my sister and her fiance cook. It isn’t difficult… cooking stuff on the bottom, baking stuff on the top, things that are used more often up front. But they always manage to move the nutmeg up front. Even when they don’t use it!
Kristina | October 11th, 2011 at 12:33 am