Especially if you have a lot of crafting supplies.
I’m struggling with a lot of fabric, yarn, and various random wooden things I paint. I have a single bedroom apartment and there’s so much stuff that some of it is on the floor.
Honestly I’ve started really evaluating if I’ll ever actually do whatever project the supplies are for and if not getting rid of them (donate, sell, whatever, varies by item).
Will I actually use that piece of scrap? Will I really ever make that thing? Am I ever honestly going to reach for that color/texture? I’ve probably cut my supplies in half doing this, got a few local people into woodworking by parsing things out, and they got to learn on my rejects that cost basically nothing to them. Now I can actually see what I’ve got and do things.
Less stuff makes it so much easier to organize and keep clean.
Everything goes into T H E D R A W E R.
Bins are the answer. Pick a bin system, make labels, and go to town. The HDX bins from HomeDepot are my favorite, being cheap, transparent, and stackable with different sizes nesting nicely, but go with whatever you like.
Labels can be handwritten on masking tape, from a label maker, or wet erase markers right on the bin itself.
You can stack the bins, use wire shelving, or build your own slide out rack for them.
You in the States?
Start looking around for milk crates. They stack.
They don’t have milk crates in other countries? How do food service workers take smoke breaks?
They don’t.
Well… since milk crates hold 4 gallons and the rest of the world’s metric… Maybe they sit on fish tubs?
Having less stuff is my main method.
I am not super organized, but this is what I do to keep myself from being a total slob. The most important thing for me is that every item I have must have a “home” where it goes when not in use.
- Workbench with pegboard backer and overhead light
- Lots of cheap 4 or 5 tier shelves
- File cabinet for paperwork
- Hardware stores will usually sell a cheap 4 pack of various size toolboxes that come nested inside each other. i use these for everything. I keep buying the same brand so they stack nice with each other. I also use shoe boxes a lot.
- Gotta cull the collection every once in a while
At work, I use the teams equivalent of a trello board to keep track of where inventory is in the warehouse.
IKEA Kallax with a combination of insets of drawers and doors and boxes that fit my particular needs. They are cheap and easy to assemble and weigh next to nothing because they are made of some kind of pressed cardboard material but they still look quite all right.
I printed a modular gridfinity system with drawers for all of my digikey stuff
Nice to see a fellow cyborg! (And if you don’t get the reference and are just a casual enjoyer of the system, that’s cool too)
I don’t, but now I am curious. Please do tell.
Zack Freedman is a big 3d printing influencer who got the system off the ground and has kind of become synonymous with it, most of the gridfinity community discussion still happens on his discord I believe. He wears a custom teleprompter eyepiece thing, calls himself and his community cyborgs, and is neurotically hilarious about puns and alliteration. He’s quite a character.
Ah, him. Yeah, I’ve stumbled across him a few times.
Clear Plastic shoe storage boxes and a label maker. Then for any bigger boxes that are not clear. Label the box and log items in my self hosted asset manager and scan the QR code to list the items in that box.
I put things in in storage areas where I think I will remember where they are, then spend 3 days looking for it tearing the house apart when I actually want to use them. Then by the time I finally find them all ambition to do the project is gone so I put it back till I’m ready again. Process repeats.
Honestly with that small of a space you may want to re-evaluate how much you can do.
This has been a lifelong struggle for me too, I always have more crap/projects going than space will really allow.
It can be incredibly hard to be honest with ourselves about this.
A few tears ago I started containerizing stuff (Sterilite makes a great variety of containers, they’re translucent and strong, and not cheap - get them at walmart). They get a *label with a date so I know when I initially boxed things up.
Using containers really helps organize, makes moving easier, and… forces me to evaluate “is this thing container-worthy?”, because containers ain’t free.
I’ve sent a lot of stuff to the charity shop.
*I’ve discovered the labeler tape by itself (unprinted) is awesome stuff. I get the large size (nearly an inch) and just have the labeler feed it through and use it as a blank - it takes sharpie really well, which is easily removed with rubbing alcohol, so I can update the date easily, or change what a box is for.
Do you mean physically or inventory?
Physically. Inventory would be smart, to stop me from buying shit I already have, but I’m worried that my apartment is in the early stages of something from Hoarders.
Other complication right now is that I’m still recovering from surgery - standing for fifteen minutes fatigues me and bending over is painful. It sucks, because I had taken off a week for cleaning at the end of last month and spent all of it in bed sick with the thing that sent me to the hospital.
If you’re not a stranger to docker, you can run something called homebox.
https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox
I use it for my home inventory and insurance.
Especially since you’re on a low physical activity recovery time, this is the perfect time to deploy and start to look at receipts and locations.
70% of the work is administrative that you can do sitting down. You’ll go through your emails or receipts and start scanning and inventory them.
Or you can just look at labels to look at how you want to organize everything. A solid inventory base is better in the long run, just takes a lot of effort to get started.
Physically I use stackable crates to organize everything, I use Hay crates, but many other manufacturers do the same thing.
Ok, just STOP.
Needed to be said. Take your time to recover - this other stuff can wait. You can spend time considering stuff, thinking about how to better manage your space and time, but don’t try to do anything right now.
I know, that’s hard to do (I’m a hypocrite about this, for sure) but it’s tough advice we all need (myself the most).
I want to second this. Even “minor” or outpatient surgery is extremely taxing on your body. Please let yourself heal
What does this word “organized” mean? Like…you can find things quickly and efficiently? You don’t lose things after you put them down?
That doesn’t sound right. I’m nearly 40 and I’ve never seen such a thing! It’s a myth!
Clear boxes
“Leave it a little better than you found it.”
There is no grand system, no master organization that can’t be defeated by just junking everything away.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Take 5 minutes at the beginning and end of each session to make your space a touch better. That’s how you “keep” things in order.
