MY EARLY ATTEMPTS AT ORGANIZING

When did you start to try to organize - your home, your stuff, your life, your office?

When I was a child I was not organized.  A true family joke is that I lost the first report card I got.  I was in first grade.  I folded it up - in half, in quarters, in eighths - and stuck it in my pocket.  Somewhere between school and home - it disappeared.  It was not fear of my grades that it made it disappear.  It just did.  Into thin air.  It was there and then it was gone. 

When I was 5 my parents had my sister and they bought a house.  A post WWII suburban tract house that was built for them.  A room of my own!  (I shared a bedroom with my parents until just before my sister was born and then I slept in the living room.  It was a small 3 room apartment.)  I now had space for my stuff in my room and in the basement too!  Wonderful. 

In short order my bedroom was a mess.  Stuff out all over the floor and the furniture.  As this went along my mother would periodically tell me that it was time to (let’s hear it from all of you) -  “Clean up your room”.  Generally this was when company was expected and they might come upstairs to the bathroom and see my room across the hall.  It had to be neat in case anyone saw it.

Now, no one ever thought to tell me how to clean up my room.  Most people need a little help getting started in this area.  My version of cleaning up my room was to throw out a few things, attempt to find a home for the others, and then toss everything onto the closet floor and shut the door.  This served the purpose of making the room presentable for anyone looking in.  It was only a case of hiding the mess.

After a while mom figured out what I was doing and had a new instruction for me - “Time to clean out your closet”.  I would take everything off the closet floor - clothing was hung in it by mom, so it was not a problem and the only place I could reach was the floor, so that was all I could mess up and all I could clean.  I would look through what was there and, again, toss a couple of things, and then put the rest back trying to make it look neater.  I remember that around May or June I would come across my Trick or Treat bag with most of the candy still in it, on the floor of my closet and toss it.

Of course no actual cleaning up was done in any of this, just stuff moved around, rearranged, and hidden.  My family tended to have a clean, fairly neat house, but there were areas of disorganization and messiness just from day to day living and lack of time to put stuff away.                     
Then I got a little older - in junior high school.  I started reading teen girls magazines.  One of them had an article on organizing your clothes. It told me that I should sort my clothes by type and color.  The clothes should all face the same way.  I did so.  I should explain that I am short and - ahem - chunky, so clothes that fit me are hard to find so I don’t have lots and lots of clothes and keep what I have as long as it stays wearable.  I have been the same height since 5th grade.  (I had a jumper which I know I had in 6th grade.  When I got married 15 years later, the jumper came with me.  My husband politely pointed out that it was not something someone of my age should wear and it finally was donated.)

I started following the rules for my hanging clothes.  Blouses together, sorted by color, pants, skirts, dresses - ditto.  I still do this.  It is one of those areas of my life and house which are organized.  I have added some categories and rearranged where the categories hang, but they are the same.  My husband thinks it odd for each clothing item to have an “assigned” space in my closet, when I have a stack of clean clothing to be put into drawers on one side of my dresser, and a stack of clothes worn, but waiting to be worn again on the other, but I do.  When I take a blouse or other piece of clothing out of the closet the hanger goes back where it was and is waiting for the item to return “home”.  (Blouse is a polite term - most of what I wear is tee shirts.)

This does not mean, however, that from junior high on my closet was organized.  Noooo!  Just my hanging clothes were.  The floor was as bad as ever and by now I could reach the top shelf, which was also a mess.

How about you?  When did you first get the idea that things needed to be organized better?  What did you try?