by Eileen Roth
For fast-food and take-out coupons, contain them in a big (6-x-5-inch) magnetic pocket posted on the less-visible side of the refrigerator. Keep menus in front and coupons in back, organized by type of food: burgers, pizza, chicken, Chinese, and so on. Purge expired coupons every month or two.
When you shop, look for a place that redeems coupons at double their face value — usually large supermarkets, where you can do much of your drugstore shopping these days too. Mark the coupons that you know you want to use on your shopping list, and then take the whole box along for the ride so you never leave one behind or miss an opportunity to double up with an in-store special. Set your box in the child seat of the shopping cart for easy browsing as you stroll the aisles.
Many Web sites offer coupons for items from groceries and sundries to electronics, books, and flowers. The great thing about cybercoupons is that the Web stores them for you; just print and clip them when it’s time to shop, and go!
Sweeping the Kitchen Clean
Keeping the kitchen clean is a daily challenge, but with a few tricks up your sleeve you can create a self-cleaning kitchen. Well . . . almost. Here are some ideas for keeping daily kitchen cleanup organized and easy.
Wash up while you wait for the water to boil, the chicken to roast, the sauce to reduce. Washing pots and pans as you use them leaves a smaller pile to clean up at the end.
Sweep after every meal, or at least at the end of each day, so crumbs and fallen food don’t get ground into the floor and create a tough cleanup job for later.
Put a plastic mat under the baby’s high chair to catch drips and spills, and then just rinse it off in the sink after feeding time.
Keep your tools close by. If you don’t have a utility closet in the kitchen for the broom, dustpan, and mop, various organizers are available to hang them from a pantry wall. A first-floor laundry room is another place to put these implements.
Use a plastic dustpan for easy washing when you sweep up something messy.
Indulge your trashy side. Most kitchens generate a great deal of garbage, so go ahead and get a nice big, plastic wastebasket that you won’t have to empty every five minutes. Keep the wastebasket clean with a plastic garbage bag liner, and watch for spills and mold in the bottom. You can add a second wastebasket alongside to hold bottles, jars, and cans on the way to your recycling bins.
The worst is over. After the kitchen, you just coast down the smooth slope toward total organization. I think now would be a good time to take a break with a cup of tea in your cleaned-up, cooled-down kitchen and contemplate the sweet taste of organizing success.
Chapter 6
Sleep on This: Bedroom Bliss
In This Chapter
Making your bedroom a great escape
Sleeping set-ups and strategies
Detangling jewelry, sorting socks, and stacking shoes
Dressing in the dark
Q uick — in what room of the house do you spend the most time? Even if you’re a true couch potato commonly found glued to the tube in the TV room, a committed gourmet cook who can’t stay out of the kitchen, or a perennial socialite spotted every night holding court in the living room, just about everyone but an insomniac spends most of their time at home in the bedroom catching up on sleep. Experts say we’re supposed to sleep a third of our lives away, and everything you do in the room dedicated to relaxation can be extra sweet when you set it up as a personal and peaceful retreat.
To get started in bringing balance to your bedrooms, select where you want to begin: yours, the kids’, or the guest bedroom. If you want, skim the headings of the following sections to target a problem area, or simply work your way through the chapter to put everything in its place. In fact, P-L-A-C-E sums up the steps that see you, start to finish, through the race.
Purge: Donate or toss clothes, broken, unused, or outgrown toys, accessories, jewelry, and perfume you haven’t worn or used in more than a year. Pitch kids’ old artwork and papers. (Yes, you can save some! Read on.)
Like with like: Organize clothes by type, style, and color. Group shoes, purses, scarves, and ties by color.
Access: Stock your bedside table with everything you need to make it through the night. Move the clothes you wear most frequently to top drawers and the closest parts of the closet, using tiers to double the number of items within reach. Find a shoe organizer that works with your space. Move off-season clothes to another closet or storage, desk and papers to the office, extra books and tapes to the family room, extra toys and games to the playroom, and kids’ papers that you want to keep to a memory box in the storage area.
Contain: Put jewelry into jewelry boxes, men’s accessories into valet trays, underwear and socks into drawer dividers, and shoes and accessories into organizers. Arrange books in bookcases and organize toys into crates, drawers, baskets, or containers with lids.
Evaluate: Do you start to relax as soon as you walk through the bedroom door? Can you crawl into bed, enjoy your favorite relaxing pursuit, and sleep through the night without getting up? Do you wake up refreshed? Can you pull together great outfits and accessories — even in the dark? Do children sleep and play in their rooms happily and safely?
Master Bedroom
It’s not just for sleeping anymore. Once considered a crash pad in which the bed was the primary focus, many adult bedrooms now double as a private place to relax, far from the blaring TV or boisterous kids. Organizing this room can send you to sleep more satisfied and calm, make opening your eyes each morning a pleasure, and provide sanctuary from the stress and strain of life.
Arranging your bedroom
With big items like beds and dressers to place and plenty of closets, doors, and windows to confuse the issue, arranging furniture for optimal bedroom function can be an architectural challenge. That’s why you need a blueprint. Refer to Chapter 3 for blueprint basics, and then use these principles to bring order to your bedroom with the following steps:
1.Sketch your bedroom to scale according to the instructions in Chapter 3.
2.Survey the possibilities of what to put in your bedroom.
Make sure you have the must-haves, and consider whether any additional options may suit your personal needs or help to streamline the room.
Must have: Bed, one or two night tables, one or two lamps, one or two dressers, a mirror, and a closet or armoire.
Optional: Built-in under-bed drawers, a headboard with a bookcase or cabinets, bookcase, media cabinet, reading chairs, and closet storage units and/or shelving.
3.Measure the big stuff — the bed, dressers, bookcase, media cabinet, armoire, and mirror and make the cutouts that I describe in Chapter 3.
4.Play with your layout.
Look for where you can optimize your space according to the principles of fingertip management and access. If you’re part of a couple, think of drawing an invisible line down the middle of the bed like in It Happened One Night (strictly for the purpose of furniture placement!), and then arrange each partner’s night table and dresser on his or her side.
Are two of you sharing a single bedside table, alarm clock, and reading lamp? Keep the peace with a pair of each situated on your respective sides. You’ll both rest easier! (The same goes for your dresser too.)
5.Roll up your sleeves and put the furniture into place.
Finishing touches might include a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and a small wooden or wicker chest at the foot of the bed to contain extra blankets that don’t fit in the linen or bedroom closet.
Do your best to keep the desk and paperwork out of the bedroom. How can you relax with all that work and worry staring you down? If there’s no alternative, keep it as neat and contained as you can. Chapters 15 and 16 provide the full lowdown on organizing your desk and papers.
Making the great escape
Because bedrooms aren’t just for sleeping anymore, why not turn yours into a personal escape that satisfies your every nee
d? Check the following list for suggestions:
Add a great reading chair with an overhead lamp and a small bookcase or end table to make the bedroom an anytime retreat. Insomniacs should skip reading in bed, so a nice recliner can provide a solution for the sleepless.
Do you like to watch your favorite show all snuggled up? Does music play a part in your love life, relaxation routine, or morning wake-up? Add a small media unit to your bedroom and organize the equipment, tapes, and discs according to the principles in Chapter 9. Closed cabinets are better than open shelves for storing media in the bedroom, where you want the picture to be purely peaceful. Keep the remote controls in your bedside table drawer so you don’t have to drag yourself out of bed to skip a track or flick off the power.
Arrange your boudoir for amour by clearing out all the workaday distractions and setting the mood with some strategically placed scented candles. Have your favorite soft-and-sultry CD ready to go and and spray your pillows lightly with your favorite scent, unless somebody’s allergic!
Stocking the amenities: Bedside table and dresser
Never does fingertip management seem as important as after you’ve crawled into bed, when a trip across the room for a pen takes on all the appeal of a trek to Siberia. For easy access, stock your bedside table with everything you need to get through the night so that you can sleep tight.
Start with a table that has drawers and/or shelves underneath to contain nightly necessities. On the tabletop go a reading lamp and alarm clock, and perhaps a radio or tape/CD player if you don’t have a stereo in the room, a white noise machine if it helps you sleep, and a coaster for a mug of tea or glass of water. The top drawer or shelf can hold a book or magazine, remote controls, eyeglasses, eye pillow or shade, pen and paper, a flashlight, and a travel alarm clock in case the power goes out.
Additional shelves or drawers can hold books and audiovisual disks or tapes. Select only your bedroom favorites and keep the rest with your main media center and library.
Middle-of-the-night ideas can be brilliant, but they can also keep you up all night if you don’t put them to rest. Keep a pen, small pad of paper, and flashlight in your night table so you can jot down anything from what your spouse should bring home from the store tomorrow to a quantum physics equation and get back to counting sheep. Some pens have built-in flashlights to assist your nighttime scribbling.
Main event: The dresser
Whether you call it a dresser, bureau, or chest of drawers, besides the bed, the dresser is the most important piece of furniture in the bedroom. How neat or messy it is governs how quickly, efficiently, and painlessly you can put yourself together on a groggy morning. The challenges with the dresser are twofold: Organizing everything you put in it and keeping the top clutter free. Like all surfaces, dresser tops too easily become storage areas. Don’t let it happen; not in your personal haven! Here’s what can stay out:
Jewelry box(es)
Perfume tray
Valet tray
One or two framed photos if you must, but why not hang them on the wall instead? Find homes for everything else in drawers.
Super-neatniks may like an armoire-style dresser that puts the top drawers or shelves behind closed doors.
Boxing it up: Jewelry
Dazzling diamonds or simple silver chains, your jewelry needs to be in its place so you can find the right pieces to polish off your look. Are you storing some of your jewelry in its original boxes? Much as you may like the feel of the ultrasuede or remembering that the bracelet came from Bloomingdales, individual boxes waste space and hide their contents from your hunting eye. Take out what’s inside and toss the containers. Exception: You can keep jewelry in its original box for storage in a fireproof or safe deposit box.
Now, box on a bigger scale. Unless you buy one of those big, expensive jewelry chests, chances are you won’t find one box that holds your entire jewelry collection, but two should do (three if you have a lot). Match the shape and size of each box to what you keep inside. For necklaces, look for one with a horizontal bar and sprockets for hanging. You’ll also find circular sprockets for long chains and necklaces, either as a separate container or on the sides of a jewelry box with drawers. (Any jewelry box designers out there reading? Please, we need more hanging space!) If you don’t have enough depth to hold bulky bracelets or earrings, buy a separate container for them.
If you’re lucky enough to have the drawer space, you can get your jewelry off the dresser top by buying sectioned units that stack, sorting into the slots by like type and style, and keeping them inside drawers.
Don’t let dust cloud the brilliance of your jewelry or perhaps increase the risk of infection in pierced ears. Skip the open-air ring displays and earring trees and contain everything inside a box or drawer.
Protect your most valuable jewelry from theft, fire, and disappearing down some mysterious crack by keeping it in a safe deposit box at the bank. Before you go, get your jewels appraised and add a rider to your home insurance policy to cover them against loss or theft. Keep a list of what’s in the safe deposit box tucked into your jewelry box, and don’t forget to get to the bank before any big affair! Most banks close by noon on Saturday.
Men’s accessories: Tray chic
Men may wear fewer adornments on average than women, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need a place to put them. A valet tray, which can range from a simple flat tray to a more elaborate affair with a drawer, may not be as serviceable as a real live Jeeves, but it’s still a help in holding onto little things such as
Tie bars
Cuff links
Watch
Wallet
Change
Pins
Pocket pen or pencil
Pocket appointment book or electronic organizer
For infrequently worn items, choose a tray with a drawer to keep them out of the dust.
Now that you have the top all figured out and you’re feeling a sense of accomplishment, take on the nitty-gritty of dresser usage and organization. What you put into the dresser is just as important as where you put it. Here is where organizing your wardrobe really begins! This piece of furniture is the place to keep the following items:
Exercise clothes
Nylons and tights
Shorts
Socks
Sweaters (hanging them stretches the shoulders)
Swimwear
Thermal underwear
T-shirts and tank tops
Underwear and lingerie
Drawer management
Separate dressers are best if you share the bedroom. If you must share the bureau too, designate separate drawers for each person.
Allocate items among drawers by putting like things together and the least frequently accessed items in the bottom drawers. No, thermal underwear doesn’t go with your slips just because you wear them both next to your skin. How often do you pull on long johns, and when do you ever add a slip on top? Put the thermals down below. Likewise, exercise hounds might want to keep their workout togs in a top drawer, but couch potatoes shouldn’t bury them in the bottom as an excuse not to move!
Close to you: Innerwear
Your delicate items like to be handled with a soft touch, so start by dedicating one drawer to underwear and another to just nylons and slips. Next, add dividers so you can find the undergarment you need with ease. I prefer the soft, padded lingerie boxes pictured in Figure 6-1 to the thin, hard plastic kind. Another option is a drawer divider such as the one shown in Figure 6-2.
If you like to wear pantyhose under pants, keep a few pairs with inconspicuously placed runs. Use a permanent marker to write an “X” on the waistband and store them separately from your good ones.
Figure 6-1: Keep lingerie straight and snag-free with soft, padded boxes.
Photo courtesy of Stacks and Stacks.
Matched pairs and lost mates: Socks
Often a mess and unmatched to boot, socks n
eed some help staying straight in the drawer. Here are my favorite sock-it-to-’em strategies:
Fold and stack. Fold each pair in half together and put them on top of each other in neat stacks.
Wrap and toss. For a more free-form approach, wrap one sock around the other into a little ball and toss it in the drawer. Nifty as this trick is, it can also stretch out the outer sock.
Divide. Install a drawer divider, either a system of snap-together flexible polymer strips that gives each pair its own slot, or parallel dividers that run from the front to the back of the drawer.
Color code. Use the front-to-back dividers so that you have a single lane of socks, and then arrange it by contrasting color — black at one end, brown at the other, and white in the middle. Navy, gray, and green can go by the whites, or start a separate row if you have enough. With precise color placement, you can match socks to pants in the dark, or at least through a colorblind morning haze. Still, I recommend a final check before you walk out the door.
See Figure 6-2 for a view of these sock-taming techniques.
Figure 6-2: Drawer dividers keep socks in line.
Power coordinating: The closet
Take a deep breath. This may hurt a little bit, but the reward is that you’ll finally open your closet door without fear and realize your wardrobe’s full potential. Clean up your clothes with six steps that will change the way you dress for the better: