The Learning Umbrella

I’m trying to revamp my house so that it works better and doesn’t end up with quite so much clutter.  It occurred to me that I have always organized by looking at the space, and trying to think how to fit things in to that space in the most efficient or pleasing manner.  That’s all well and good, if the space is left to itself.  But as soon as you plug more people into the system, you have a human element that may or may not work with the space and the organization.

With that in mind, I have done a project that I called by the fancy title of “Household Systems Analysis”.  Basically, I sat and thought of every activity we do in our house, and what materials that involves.  I thought of how those materials are used, and where they are supposed to be stored.  I had DH sit down and read through my analysis, and he added his own thoughts and observations.  We made a list of 23 “action items” to do to make the house work better with the real humans that actually live in it.

I won’t bore you with the entire list or analysis,  but a few things really jumped out at me.

1.  Our house has a kitchen with a laundry room off it, and you have to go through the laundry room to get to the garage.  We had set up my “home office” along one wall of the kitchen, and we had food pantry and recycling bins and a worm bin in the laundry room.  My fabric and sewing stuff was stored on shelves in the garage.  We realized that this really didn’t work very well, and we switched things around.  Now, the food storage is out in the garage (where it actually stays cool and that’s nice for boxes of apples and things) on shelves.  I brought my sewing stuff into the laundry room, and put my home office in there also.  Now, I have a room of my own.  The kitchen has a ugly line of platic bins along one wall now (animal food, recycling bins, trash can, worm bin, and mop bucket), but it’s highly functional.  So even though it’s not as pleasing to the eye, keeping those things right out where we actually use them is less work for me.

2.  Every time we come and go, we are carrying things in and out of the house.  We needed some place to keep our own “launching pads”, and it had to be close to the door and convenient.  So I cleared off some bookshelf space near our front door, and that now has a basket for each person to keep mittens, hats, etc. in, shelves for bags (a different bag for each activity – and they all used to end up in a pile on the floor), and some open shelf space for just stuff that needs to go somewhere.  With coat hooks on the wall next those shelves and a shoe rack under the coat hooks, we now have a useful entry/exit area.

3.  We read out loud, snuggle under blankets, watch TV, and do hand sewing in our living room area.  And yet none of those things (except the TV) were actually kept on hand in that area.  So I got a book basket and a sewing basket and set those on the floor between my recliner and the sofa.  Blankets can just drape on the furniture – it’s OK for them to stay out!  And I got a little basket that sits on the end table and holds the remote controls.

There are still many more Action Items for me to go through, but I think I will actually end up with a house that is easier to live in.  It may not look as nice (like those plastic bins in the kitchen), but it will be “highly functional” and the kind of place that can hopefully almost “clean itself” as people don’t have to go out of their way to put things away.