M Martone Organizing | A place for everything and everything in its place.

Out of the shoe boxes and up on your walls!

How do they do it? Those deliciously perfect wall displays of photos: not one crooked, all the frames coordinated… why can’t your walls look like that?

Well they can, for a price. (And if you value your soul at more than $350.00, the price could be significantly lower than any kind of deal with the devil you were planning out of desperation.) The PerfectPictureWall may be what you’ve been waiting for. This system provides frames, hardware, mats, and most magically of all, a self-leveling template that you place on your wall to show you where every single nail goes for a perfect display.

Finally. Your kids’ pictures up on the walls while they’re still young enough to think it’s cool.

The promise of beauty… even after it’s gone

If you wear makeup, you probably like to buy makeup. And if you like to buy makeup, you probably accumulate makeup. For some reason, it doesn’t occur to us to thin out our wealth of beauty supplies, perhaps because it makes us feel rich in options. Unfortunately, lipstick isn’t a safe, long-term investment. The FDA, when not deciding which cough syrups we have to present a little ticket to the pharmacist to buy, keeps track of the cosmetic industry, and has reported on how long makeup is actually safe for. A quick list looks like this:

lipstick: 1 year
mascara: 3 months
foundation: 3-6 months
powder: 2 years
nail polish: 2 years

I know you have makeup in your bathroom older than that. So get in there and start remembering when “Tropical Tango” was your favorite lip color.

But then you have a wastebasket full of bottles… what’s an environmentally responsible organizer to do? Most local recycling programs won’t take packaging that is not easily identified (like soda bottles or spaghetti sauce jars), but Origins has stepped up to the plate and started a program that takes packaging from any cosmetic company for recycling. They’ll even hook you up with a free sample of one of their skin care products for your efforts. Nice!

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(Thanks for the tip, Nadalia!)

Medicine cabinet, heal thyself.

I could be wrong, but I’m thinking that you have a lot of products in your bathroom: soaps, medicine, maybe “some” makeup. And if it feels a little jumble-y or cluttered in there, a quick way to thin the herd is simply to look at expiration dates. Medicine will have the date in some easy-to-read location, and you’d be surprised at how old some of that cough syrup can be. Get rid of it! Flush the liquids and pills and recycle any bottles you can. Then put a note on the fridge to buy some new ibuprofin.

But what to do with possibly elderly makeup? Check in next time!

Egg in a box!

I am apparently not the only one who has a problem with getting too much rice when she gets Chinese food. And where I am likely to ziplock it and freeze it for rice pudding or soup some other day, I love what these two sisters came up with as a solution to minimizing food waste and putting that food where it belongs: in hungry people. Egg in a box!

No fancy PDA

Every Saturday morning when I was growing up, my dad would sit down at breakfast, bust out his pack of rubber-banded index cards, click his mechanical pencil, and set out the day’s priorities. Every job that came across his bow got entered on the cards. Toy broken? Written on the cards. Project you need help with? On the cards. Once it was on the cards, you knew justice would be done. This ritual still plays out each week, and some of those cards are pretty fuzzy. I teased him recently that if I looked at some of the crossed out items I’ll see something like “fresh sand for Mary’s sandbox.”

As an adult (and very much my father’s daughter), I know that I need to have my very own stack of rubber-banded index cards because I’m very absent-minded. If I don’t write every darned thing down, it just won’t happen. Plus, the half memories of what I should be doing will rattle around my head torturing me. So the cards are good for remembering and, oddly, forgetting what it’s okay to forget.

You don’t need a fancy system for organizing your to-dos. You just need a system. I should have known that my dad was a hipster ahead of the curve.

Whooooosh.

“Through the years I have found it wonderful to acquire, but it is also wonderful to divest. It’s rather like exhaling.”

Helen Hayes

No more wire hangers!

This is a little bit hard to talk about, because, frankly, it disturbs me to my core to see jumbles of tangled wire hangers in people’s closets (or in baskets, or on the floor…). At best, they crease your clothing because they’re thin. At worst, they sag and drop clothing, and catch on each other.

Just stop.

Here are two ways to banish wire hangers from your life with a minimum of guilt:
1. If you are a dry cleaning regular, bring the hangers back to the dry cleaner. They’ll love you for it. (The dry cleaners, and the hangers.)
2. Consider asking your dry cleaner to order EcoHangers. They’re made from recycled, biodegradable paperboard and recycled bottle caps, and since they’re a marketing tool for advertisers, your dry cleaner may be able to get them for free. And then when you end up with too many of these in your closet, you have the choice of bringing them back or recycling them.

Where should I file my unicorn?

Yes, I did once have a pair of rainbow suspenders. But I challenge anyone else who weathered the roller rinks of the late 1970’s to look me in the eyes and tell me that they themselves committed no such crime. (Go ahead. I’m waiting.)

Time having passed, though, I can now recommend rainbow-themed items to my people, for all of their festive storage needs. Looking for the perfect place for your spectrum analysis documents? The files for organizing the gay pride festival? Your top-secret notes on new Crayola colors and names? The Semikolon Rainbow Expanding File is your go to paper wrangler.

Seriously, if you’re a visual person who has a hard time differentiating between same colored folders in a file, this is perfect, especially for files that you need to bring with you. It can be easier to remember a color than to read file labels each time you want to tuck something away.

Plus, it’s bright enough not to disappear or get mixed up with someone else’s files. Perfect!

Yes is more

I know I’m not the first person to get on the whole “Yes” bandwagon, but as time goes by, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that many, many good things come from saying yes.

Simple example?
“Would you like these free tickets to the rollerderby?”
“Yes!”
Awesome!

But what about a less obvious example?
“Would you like to go through your office with me to see what you’re still using and what you may not need anymore?”

That’s not fair, right? If you say “yes”, someone’s going to take things away from you. You’ll have less stuff. You’ll have to give up free time to do the work. That “yes” feels like a “no” doesn’t it?

But check this out. There are secret yesses sprinkled all through reorganizing and thinning.

* One of the most literal ones is finding things you forgot you had, sometimes even technically valuable things like money and gift cards.

* There are these yesses: “Yes, this is important to keep,” and “Yes, I can let this go.” And a series of those active choices is all it takes to conquer that crazy pile of things made up of who knows what, that you’re ignoring because it’s a little scary.

* There’s the “yes” of deciding that spending an afternoon on your space is not just worth the time, but critical to your mental health and functioning in other parts of the world.

* There are the important yesses along the way, when you decide to keep things that are important just to you. It’s your space and your stuff. Your decisions. (Just make sure you have someone to help you find good places to tuck the keepers.)

* And, at the end, there’s the long, satisfied “yesssss” that escapes your lips as you sink down in your desk chair and survey your freshly organized space.

Learning from my clients

One of the many reasons I love being an organizer is all of the great conversations I get to have with my clients. And although I’m technically the one who’s supposed to be laying down the wisdom, I never leave without having learned something. In one recent case, it was what a “varmint target” is. In another, more-relevant-to-my-needs case, it was this jewel of an observation: “Most people don’t realize that they can have almost everything they want, as long as they aren’t rigid about the order in which they get those things.” We’d been discussing the fact that so many people have a youthful vision of meeting someone special, building a career, settling down, getting a home, having children… but if they find one of those steps hard to achieve, they may let it stop the whole process. What if you don’t meet that perfect person, and you’re in your 30s, and you want to buy a house? What if you have your kid(s) before everything else happens? What if? What if you could acknowledge the good things you’re achieving, and controlling what you can, and letting the other stuff go? I know, it’s hard.

The corollary observation my client made was that people look at a person who seems to have achieved a certain body of accomplishments (for example, being partnered, having a child, a career, a home); and they may make assumptions about the order that all happened in. But you never know, do you? Maybe that’s a new husband. Maybe that kid showed up long ago. So even people who seem to represent the set of accomplishments you desire, may very well have taken a twisting road to that place.

Mercy and patience are critical to getting your home and life organized in a sustainable way. Here’s just one more way to think about getting to the place you want to be.