Average Jane

Average Jane Starts Getting Unstuck

Feel free to skip over this post if you're sick of hearing about my home organization project, but I can't stop writing about it because it's having such a profound effect on my quality of life.

I am fundamentally a nester. Not that I'm a big horoscope person, but I've had people look at mine and tell me it's a wonder I ever leave the house. 

This is my "starter house" and at some point this summer I'll have lived here for 25 years. I have no intention of ever leaving. In fact, if I were to suddenly get rich, my dream would be to bulldoze this house and build a nicer, more energy-efficient one in its place. 

Two-and-a-half decades is a long time to live in one place. My husband and I have been pretty good about keeping the super-noticeable clutter at bay and we have a habit of renting a dumpster every five years or so to make sure. However, it gets easier and easier to look past the massive amounts of smaller stuff you're keeping for absolutely no reason once you've spent that long with it.

This weekend, I crossed one of my extra projects off the list. I'd decided it would be nice to get an enclosed cupboard with a hutch to replace the open bakers' rack we've been using as a microwave and cookbook stand all this time. Nothing screams, "I decorated this room in the 1990s" like a bakers' rack.

I found the perfect cupboard on Facebook Marketplace. It was a great color and it had already been marked down a few times by the sellers, who were clearing out their house in preparation to move out of state. I made the deal, measured the cargo space in my car and drove the 20 miles to pick it up.

It didn't fit. If magic were real, you could have put them where they needed to go, but it was impossible to fit the second piece through the hatch opening once the first piece was in. Fortunately, we managed to load the cabinet part and there was nothing to be done but bring it home and arrange to get the hutch the next day.

I did that and I love the whole thing enough that it was worth the 80+ miles and hours of driving it took to finally get it all home.

Yesterday I cleared off the old rack. You guys, there was SO MUCH STUFF on there! Dozens and dozens of cookbooks, some dating back to when I was growing up. A bear-shaped cookie jar, sans head/lid for as long as I can remember, filled with cat grooming accessories and an impressive amount of catnip. Two sediment-filled bottles of plum wine that a friend made. My gigantic stack of recipe printouts that still need to be organized into a binder. The clay jar I use to store onions. I'm sure there was more I'm forgetting. It's truly a testament to how sturdy the rack is. I don't remember where it came from, but it's a quality item.

I got my husband to help me set up my new cupboard. The previous owners had simply set the hutch on top of the lower cabinet and called it a day, but in this house full of rambunctious animals, I felt driven to buy a pair of T-brackets to make sure the top couldn't be tipped over. I also needed to cut a hole in the back of the hutch so I could run the microwave cord behind it. That was far more of a hassle than I expected because it's very solid piece of furniture that's made of actual wood, so it required some effort.

Oh, and I dropped and broke one of the glass panes for the upper cabinet doors while I was trying to put it in. Getting a new one is now on my to-do list for sometime in the next few weeks.

Even with the hassles, it's been unexpectedly lovely to finally have a place for certain items like my teapots that really hadn't had their own spot up to now. Lots of the items in the upper cabinet had once been just sort of hanging out on a counter or windowsill and now they're actually on display.

I am so glad I started this home improvement project. Just imagine what I can do next year after all of these tasks are out of the way!

Average Jane's Home Organizing Project

If you're following the saga of my self-assigned year of organizing, I can report that it is going exceedingly well. I'm trying not to over-report about it here, but there are some developments over the past couple of weeks that are changing some of my mindsets in ways I hadn't anticipated initially.

Deliberate Donations

I knew that this project would involve throwing away, giving away and donating a lot of items from my house, but the purge volume is turning out to be much higher than I thought it would be. At first, I was just taking everything with residual value and dumping it at the thrift store, but when I got to my linen closet, I started thinking about better ways to get the items directly to people who can use them most.

We have a charity in town called Sleepyhead Beds that focuses on providing beds and bedding to families and children. Once I pulled everything out of my linen closet and drawers, I remembered that I also had significant amounts of bedding stuffed into big plastic tubs in my basement. I'd already bagged everything up willy-nilly, but I realized it made more sense for me to unpack the bags, match up the pillow cases with the sheets, and re-bag the items that Sleepyhead Beds will take. I'll have my husband drop it all off during their business hours some weekday soon.

I also ran across some towels I no longer use, so those will go to a nearby animal shelter, along with all of the cardboard trays that my brand of cat litter comes in. I have been letting them pile up in the basement out of sheer laziness, but it's a simple thing to remove the plastic to recycle along with my plastic grocery sacks and stack the cardboard trays for donation.

Permanent Upgrades

Cleaning out the cupboard where I store my baking pans opened my eyes to the potential for getting rid of a large number of low quality cookie sheets and baking pans. I'm replacing them with two high-quality half-sheet pans that will probably serve me well indefinitely. One of my old cookie sheets is so warped that I once used it to bake a butter-heavy type of cookie, only to have the entire panful slide to one side and form a giant cookie Pangaea. 

I don't think that will be happening again.

Making Life Easier

This whole project is ultimately serving to cut down on the nagging pull in the back of my mind of work I know needs to be done. A welcome side-effect is that every completed project makes some aspect of my home life more convenient. Call it feng shui or just good organization, but the upshot is that when I need to find something in one of the places I've already worked on, it's exactly where it should be.

And One New Rule

I'd already decided that if I did an assignment early, I could just skip that week when I got to it. Well, this was the week when I had to decide what to do if I didn't complete my weekly project. Between a lack of motivation on Saturday and a lot of other things to do on Sunday, it was clear that my task for this weekend wasn't going to get done. So I made a new rule that in these instances, I would swap the missed work project on the spreadsheet with the first one that had been completed early. That way, I get to move on to whatever was next and get to the skipped project later on.

Why not just do it next week? I could have gone that route, but I suspected that my failure to complete an assignment might attach some psychological baggage. Moving it down the list to a logical but relatively random date helps ensure that I'll approach it with a fresher outlook. Plus, it maintains the spirit of my earlier rule by still giving me a week off - just not the week I originally would have gotten.