I am convinced that buying special containers will not make you more organized. While the internet is full of gift-wrapping stations and make-your-own bows, it is perfectly fine to keep your real-life gift wrap in a cardboard box in the closet. You don’t have to cover the box with fabric or paint it.

This is a modest way to organize, but that’s partly why I want to share it. If you have a small home or you want to simplify, I want to be realistic and say that it’s easier to have one or two rolls of wrapping paper instead of a whole bunch that you organize into a wall display.

Mine is stored in the most humble of all containers: the liquor store cardboard box. It has been for years, and it’s just the right size for the bags, tissue, boxes, and bows.

Inside the box, a shopping bag acts as a divider so I can file gift boxes, tissue paper and gift bags on their sides. That helps me to see it all and find what I need. When it gets too full, I give some of them away to family members who will use them again.

The bows are in one of those plastic zippered bags you get when you buy new sheets.

I want to reuse gift wrap as many times as I can, so I always save gift bags, smooth out the tissue paper, and save the bows. Some of our gift bags have been around for years, used dozens of times; it’s almost funny.

I usually keep just one roll of gift wrap, and silver is a color that works for everyone at every event. I also like to use brown kraft paper, especially for Christmas, but most of the gifts I wrap are for classmate birthday parties, and I was informed that brown is not fancy enough for kindergarteners. (We usually give art supplies for classmate gifts—art paper and markers or paints.)

Having gift wrap ready at home saves a lot of money instead of having to buy something for a last-minute gift. If you have too much, keep only a few gift bags in different sizes, and get rid of wrapping paper that is too thin or hard to work with.

See the comments for this post: Simplified Gift Wrap

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A couple of years ago I wrote about how much I love Evernote. I use it to collect notes for all of my projects. Since I use it every single day, it’s worth mentioning again.

Evernote is how I organize my notes and ideas on my computer. The software is free, and you can create your own notes or clip from the web.

I use it to organize research, recipes, rough drafts, blog post ideas, and even trip planning. It’s like my own private Pinterest to save my favorite things, fabric samples, and notes from the books I read.

Right now I use it mostly for writing projects and home design ideas, but it was a lifesaver when I was shopping for a house. I  saved the listings and images for every house that we considered so I could keep track of them all, and I even saved maps and info about the local schools. That was such a crazy time, and it helped me make the most of the time we spent with the realtor since I had all my research in a searchable format.

I use Evernote to collect ideas and drafts for blog posts. I like to jot down notes without having to save files. Even when I get too many notes, it’s easy to find things with searches.

It’s invaluable since I have so many projects going on at once. My computer would be a mess otherwise, and I’d be walking around with post-it notes stuck to me. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it. You can download it here.

See the comments for this post: Evernote is Still as Awesome as Ever

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I finally organized the stuff in my medicine cabinet, which I am very happy about because before it looked like this:

Band-aid wrappers. Open blister packs. A few almost-empty bottles. Some was at the bottom of a closet in a cardboard moving box, and the rest was scattered around the house after various colds and illnesses this winter.

I wanted to have it all in one place so I could find it, and also so I could tell the babysitter where to find the first-aid supplies. I wasn’t even sure what we currently had.

The Mayo Clinic has a list for what you should put in a first-aid kit. (Click here.)

Part of the reason why the medicine was unorganized is because the bathroom looks like this, in half-renovated fashion. There is no sink and no storage. I didn’t have a place to put anything. I’ve actually gotten used to it.

Then Jules at Pancakes and French Fries showed how she puts her medicine in the kitchen. It was so clear and simple. I was just sitting there, thinking:

Oh. So that’s how to do it.

I even had some empty cabinets at the far end of the kitchen, away from the heat and cooking, and conveniently close to the back door.

I sorted the medicine into three sections: one for medicine that is just for the kids, one for first aid with a few more grown-up medicines tossed in, and a group of supplements such as Vitamin C, enzymes, and the calcium chew-ables that taste like Starburst candy.

What took the longest was deciding to dispose of the ones that were expired. It was hard to do because, basically, I felt like I was throwing away money. In addition to the cost, I was thinking about calamity and how in a disaster, wouldn’t I prefer to have recently-expired medicine instead of no medicine?

Then I realized what I was looking at was not life-saving medicine but stuff like honey cough suppressant and anti-itch cream. In other words: no big deal.

Maybe disposing of unused medicine was good because it meant we hadn’t needed it after all, and when my family does get sick, I will take five dollars to the drug store and buy them some new medicine.

Now everything is easier to find, and it’s also harder for the kids to reach.

See the comments for this post: Organize Your Medicine Cabinet

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I was thinking the other day of how some families pay their kids money for doing extra chores at home. Apparently, my kid was thinking about this too.

When my five-year-old daughter offered to pay me ten quarters to clean her room, I laughed. Then she upped her offer to three euros, and I knew she meant it.

She really did want her room to be clean and pretty, but it was too difficult for her to do on her own. I get overwhelmed at the thought of trying to clean and organize her room, and she’s only five, so how does it make her feel?

We already simplify and declutter the toys, and my daughter is good at that, actually too good. She doesn’t have too many toys or books or even stuffed animals. The issue we’re facing is that some of her stuff is so random, we don’t know where it should go.

For small kids, you can put their toys on a shelf sorted into baskets with logical categories: dolls, blocks, cars, little stuff, and so on.

When I was a teenager, the problem in my room was that I had too many clothes.

At her age level, stuff seems to defy organization. Old Valentine cards from school? Completed craft projects? Those don’t mean that much to me, but they mean something to her, and she wants to keep them. A toy microphone, a fairy wand, an Easter basket…when a lot of things like this are on the floor, it’s tough to know where to start.

I bring in a tool to help simplify the process: one big box.

• If something is trash, put it in the trash can.
• If it’s dirty clothes, put it in the laundry bin.
• Put everything else on the floor into the box.

This simplifies the decision process to only three options. It also helps us to get the floor and surfaces cleaned up quickly so that it’s not so overwhelming to be in there.

When the floor is clear and the room appears to be picked up, we can take one thing out of the box at a time and say, “Okay, where does this go?” and find an organized place for everything. (And if we need to quit early, the room at least looks better.)

I also got the clothes that were too small out of the way, and I’ll try to do better about paying more attention to their bedrooms on a daily basis.

See the comments for this post: How to Make It Easier to Clean Kids’ Rooms

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I’m almost finished filing my papers, and my file box is full now. Stuffed, actually.

This file box has been so handy to me. I bought it ten years ago, at a Wal-Mart, for $2.50. I bought another one just like it, so I had a pair of file boxes, both full of papers organized neatly.

One year later as I looked at it, I realized that my only reason for keeping most of those papers was because I had organized them. I had made labels, and sorted them, alphabetized them, and saved them. Organization made the papers look more important than they actually were. So I tossed the ones that I didn’t need to keep, reduced my files down to one box, and determined that all my files would always be limited to one box, from that day forward.

It’s been that way ever since.

I like this box because it’s lightweight and portable. Have you ever needed to move a full file cabinet? This box works no matter where I live, even in the places where I didn’t have a desk. I like that I can carry it to the living room and go through the papers while watching TV.

My life is more complicated now than it was ten years ago; I have paperwork for four people instead of one, but the papers still fit in the box since most documents can be stored digitally without keeping a paper version.

This file crate has rails so you can slide hanging file folders, and if you have more than one, it’s stackable.

My next step is to do the routine maintenance of pulling the files that no longer apply and putting in a few new files.

My files hold more than documents. Here are some things I store in file folders to reduce clutter around my house:

I file gift cards and member cards in a file folder with plastic sheets that are made to organize business cards. I like being able to flip through the pages easily and find the card I need when I’m planning to go shopping.

To keep coupons from getting lost or scattered all over the house, I have a coupon file, and I just drop them in the box.

Portraits and pictures that are too big to go into a photo box with other loose photos go in a file to keep them safe and uncreased. It’s not acid-free or archival quality of course, so I’ll find a better long-term solution for the important ones, but this way they won’t get lost in the meantime.

Some of the kids’ artwork that we might want to keep goes in a file after we’re finished looking at it, sometimes just to give it a place to be other than the kitchen counter. Later we’ll look through a few pieces and decide what to put in the kids’ portfolios.

We don’t save everything. (Here’s what we do with the artwork we don’t keep.)

I have some travel documents and memorabilia that I haven’t brought myself to look through yet, and when I do, I might make them into a collection.

I have a box for personal memorabilia where I save cards and letters. (Here is how I keep the sentimental things to a manageable level.)

See the comments for this post: Clear the Clutter: Limit the File Storage

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You might be wondering why my spice jars have tiny pink chicks on the tops.

One day I was having a hard time, and when I arrived at home, Doug had glued pink chicks to everything in the pantry to cheer me up. Imagine them on the tops of cereal boxes, crackers, bottles of oil, spices, and tea. Everywhere. Pink chicks had completely taken over the pantry, so I let them stay. That was a couple of months ago, and they’ve been here ever since.

The last time I sorted through my spices, I had quite a few more than I do today. Twice as many, perhaps. I didn’t want to throw them away because spices are so expensive, you know? Some of them were ten years old, dried basil from 1998!

What we forget is that spices are food. They’re supposed to have a scent. We wouldn’t eat ten-year-old food in most cases, but yet we still hold on to those tiny old bottles of marjoram and anise and allspice as if they make our spice cabinet look more official, even when we never use them.

Let’s clean out the spice cabinet and keep the spices that we really use, not the ones we think we’re supposed to keep. Old spices taste like paper and smell like dust, and they are not going to help our recipes.

The good news is that you don’t have to worry about spending money to buy more spices. You weren’t using the old ones anyway, so you don’t have to replace them!

How long do spices last? According to McCormick,

• Seasoning blends: 1-2 years
• Herbs: 1-3 years
• Ground spices: 2-3 years
• Whole spices (such as cinnamon sticks and peppercorns): 3-4 years
• Extracts: 4 years (except for pure vanilla, which lasts indefinitely)

Some people have asked me about buying the big containers of spices to save money at wholesale clubs like Sam’s and Costco, but I don’t recommend that unless you own a restaurant.

I prefer to buy small amounts of spices from grocery stores that sell spices in the bulk bins. I bought a bag of bay leaves for only eleven cents! It’s a lot cheaper when you don’t have to buy the bottles. I either refill my own bottles or just keep a few of the little bags in a wooden bowl.

You can label a repurposed bottle or write the purchase date as a reminder with a Sharpie marker. You can write directly on glass jars, and the marker ink comes off with rubbing alcohol. (I learned this from a reader’s comment.)

To keep your spices fresh longer, store them away from heat, light, and moisture. You probably don’t want to keep them right next to the stove.

I keep my spices on a shelf in the pantry, so I have a tiered shelf to help me see and reach them all. I think I got it from the Container Store.

If you aren’t sure how old your spices are, just smell or taste it to see if it still has flavor.

See the comments for this post: Organize the Spice Shelf

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I have been writing here at Small Notebook for four years now. Four years!

If I was writing this blog twelve years ago, it would sound very different. I was single and living by myself at the time, and I worked a lot, so whenever I organized something at home it would stay that way. Organizing was my hobby that I did sometimes because it made me feel like I was doing a good job. My papers were always neatly filed, and my clothes were always put away. It was easy.

Fast forward a few years, and organizing was no longer something I did to pass my free time, but something I was doing to keep up with an apartment and a family. It was not easy anymore. I also tried to focus on simplifying and having less stuff.

I started writing this blog, and after two years of focusing on simplifying and organizing, I felt frustrated that I was still spending so much of my time taking care of stuff. There was always something we needed to buy or replace, and I was spending time cleaning and picking up. It took time to make donations and keep records for tax purposes and sort through closets. I didn’t feel like there was an end to it.

I started having doubts about this whole process of simplifying.

If the idea of simplifying is to make your life simpler and free up some time, then why does it take so much time? And you’re never done!

Would it be easier, I wondered, simpler even, to just ignore my stuff? Was the process of trying to break free from consumerism and all my stuff actually causing me to think about my stuff more? I was spending a lot of time trying to make careful decisions about what I bought, I was going through closets and photos. What if I just put everything in a closet and pretended it wasn’t there?

At first our simplifying was about clutter removal, but gradually it became about clutter prevention. For example:

• I didn’t want to buy more clothes after I had just cleaned out my closet and donated several.
• I opted-out of receiving catalogs, phone books, and junk mail so I would have fewer papers to sort, and I started getting all of my bills and statements via digital download.
• I bought fewer clothes for the kids because I noticed I was organizing so many outgrown clothes that were not worn enough.

I didn’t see it at the time, but the process of simplifying was helping me. It was like an investment for the future, and it let me do a lot of things last year that would have been more difficult otherwise, such as putting our stuff into a storage unit and going to Europe for three months, convincing my husband to take a year-long work sabbatical after working for twenty-five years, and making it through a home search and renovation. Plus day-to-day life with kids. (Also? We’re about to launch a business. I’ll have to tell you more about that later.)

Simplifying and organizing go together. When you simplify your stuff, you don’t need to spend so much time organizing it. I skipped filing papers for a year while I worked on other things, and nothing bad happened.

Becoming more organized is not the goal. In fact, simplifying is not the goal either. Both are tools to help you reach better goals that involve people, plans, and dreams.

I used to have a nice coworker, and we got along well because we both liked order. He lined up his french fries in a row before he ate them one by one. He loved his wife, and even though his wife didn’t place as much importance on order as he did, he didn’t say anything about that to her because he wanted a happy home more than he cared about  having the plastic wrap and the foil nicely lined up in the kitchen drawer. It just wasn’t that important.

I want my organizing efforts to be beneficial but stop short of crazy lady with color-coded menu plans and label maker. At Small Notebook I’ll try to put my advice on the left side of the organizational bell curve.

See the comments for this post: Getting More Organized is Not the Goal

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I don’t file my papers on a regular basis. I know I’m supposed to, but my life is busy. Most of my papers go into a special file labeled, “I’ll Deal With This Later.”

So every year in January I try to control the damage and file the papers that I have let pile up. I know it’s actually February now, but as Alicia said, February is sort of like extra January.

It’s been more than three years since I did my first Paper Pile Makeover, and that one was a doozy. I had been trying to organize it all, and I learned that I should have been purging it. I got rid of a massive pile of paper by asking the question, “Why do I still have this?”

Now most of my incoming paperwork is digital, so even though I haven’t filed papers all year, the good news is that the stack I currently have is only seven inches tall.

Most people will give you the advice that you should start at the top of your stack, pick up the first piece of paper and deal with that one. Either file it or recycle it, but only touch it once before you move on to the next. Personally, I find this method to be painfully tedious and dull. I am motivated by quick results and makeovers. And also easiness.

Since I don’t want to spend all day working on my papers, here is my approach:

Reduce them by half.

Some papers are easier to deal with than the rest. I can make a big impact on this stack just by going through and quickly recycling the papers I don’t need anymore. I can file a few of them, and before I know it, the stack is half its size.

The next time I sit down to sort the papers, I’ll reduce it by half again, either recycling or filing them. They won’t be as easy this time, but the stack will be smaller. Each organizing session will have fewer papers to deal with, and by the time I get to the papers that I’ve been avoiding, I’ll almost be done.

I keep my physical papers in an inexpensive plastic crate that I’ve used for more than a decade. Most of my papers are scanned and on the computer. I keep my computer next to me so that I can update my calendar, address book, and to do list with notes as I go through the papers.

What you’ll need: a recycle bin, a scanner, your computer or notebook, and files.

Start your timer, and see what kind of impact you can make in an hour. I spent an hour working on my paper stack, and I managed to get the stack down to half its size. It was originally seven inches, and I worked it down to three and a half by recycling and filing.

Bonus! I found $155 in cash and checks that I had forgotten I had.

This is not the end. There is still more work to do, but it’s enough for today.

If you want to read more about how I deal with papers, you’ll find all the ideas in the Real Solutions: Paper section of this blog. We’ll also be talking about it more in the coming weeks.

See the comments for this post: When You Haven’t Filed Papers All Year, Reduce Them by Half

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I have a lot of drop-in surprise visitors at my house, and I mean a lot. One time last month we had people unexpectedly stop by our house four different times in one day. It was like a sit-com.

And honestly, I love it when people stop by.

The most important rule when someone comes to your house, whether their visit is a surprise or not, is that you never apologize for your mess.

Apologizing sends the message, “I’m embarrassed, and I wish you hadn’t come.” A little bit of a mess will help people feel more comfortable when you don’t let it bother you. Besides, you don’t know how their house looks, and you wouldn’t want to make them feel bad.

My kitchen table can look messy when people stop by. We use it, so it should. I always give myself a mental high-five if the breakfast dishes are washed and the counters are clear. I cringe a little if part of my home is really trashed, but I use it as motivation to clean things up more before the next guest comes.

All this brings me to the point that most guests will not see your whole house. If anything, they will notice the front entry, so it helps me to feel more confident when the front of our house looks orderly.

My favorite way to add order and style to a front entry is to place hooks on the wall. This little detail works no matter where I live. I prefer the hooks to be about 3.5 feet up from the floor, about kid-height. You want to leave a few hooks open for guests. (Don’t hang all of your coats and bags, most should go in the closet.) Hooks always give a feeling of organization.

My recent find at a consignment antique store is this old handmade cabinet. I was excited to have a place to put the pottery I made, and the lower cabinet contains media, puzzles, and games. I put my collection of pottery mostly on the upper shelves because I want to keep the first shelf open for guests to put their stuff and handbags on it. I can count on this space staying organized so it looks nice when people drop by.

See the comments for this post: Create a Good First Impression: Organize Your Front Entry

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My kitchen is in progress right now, but a few months ago when we bought our house it looked like this:

Untouched from 1970. Very dark with lots of harvest gold.

During our first week of home ownership we pulled down the upper cabinets that divided the food prep area from the eat-in area. My heart raced as I anxiously watched those heavy oak cabinets be pried off the ceiling and come crashing down. It was for the best, as it opened up the space.

We considered removing the lower cabinets and counter that divide the room as well, but I’m glad we didn’t. We noticed during that first week how often we piled our tools on the counter, and it was so useful. It is the main landing spot in the house.

The kitchen counter is our dumping ground for everything that we bring into the house: groceries, bags, and school papers. It’s the place where we temporarily set glasses, tools, and toys as we come in from other rooms. It’s where I wrap gifts, pack lunches, and serve up meals for family and guests.

The kitchen is the center for work and activity in the house, and having a clear counter to serve as a work surface is essential.

We often treat the kitchen counter as a storage space, but it’s supposed to be a work space. Storage can get in the way. We can put our stuff on the counter, but that doesn’t mean it should stay there. It needs to move out of the way for the next activity to happen.

Let’s work on clearing off the kitchen counter today.

I always have a dish drying rack next to the sink, but otherwise I try to keep the counters as clear as I can. When I set something down temporarily, it’s obvious and out of place. This gives me incentive to put things where they should go.

See the comments for this post: Clear Your Kitchen Counter (It’s a Work Space, Not a Storage Space)

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