i’ve lived in this house since sixth grade and i’m currently a junior in college. i clean my bathroom counter every now and then, but over the years i’ve just accumulated so much stuff and i’ve never really dealt with it…. until now. keep in mind that not only did i never finish unpacking from recently moving out of my apartment, but i also just got back from a trip to the mountains so there’s that stuff laying around too. i’m also just a packrat. don’t judge me.
behold, The Great Bathroom Unfucking of 2013:
[after the break]
So, it was the day after Fall Finals, and after ten or eleven long weeks of ignoring the beast of my room, I finally allowed myself to sort of face the collective mess and just reality in general:
My room wasn’t just a sty, my room was completely and totally fucked.
There’s a lot of pictures coming, so I’ve put the rest of the story and the fucked-room evidence under a fancy little cut.
In an effort to work on cleaning something each day I focused on my sock drawer. I had gone through and matched most of it and had all these extra socks that didn’t fit in the drawer. Today it was time to go through and get rid of what wouldn’t fit in the drawer. All that’s left are a few that I couldn’t match and am hoping to the next time I do laundry, and also the ones that are in the laundry. Yay, organization!
The first two are before photos and the last is my nicely organized drawer. I also have a target bag full of socks that I’m getting rid of for only the reason that I desperately need to get rid of stuff/simplify my life.
I cleaned my craft table/desk*! And then vacuumed. Yay!
* As I call it, even though I hardly ever actually do crafting, to differentiate it from my computer desk.
youcrashquimssaysfuckthepolice:
In certain situations, the inability to throw anything away can become a pathological disorder known as “hoarding”[1]. Glorified in some popular television series, hoarding problems affect between two and five percent of the American population, keeping them from fully using their living space and interfering with their daily lifes. But for those who don’t struggle with this psychological issue, getting rid of extra stuff can be liberating and energizing. (Plus you won’t scare off potential suitors when they stop by before that date.)
Good piece for those who have trouble parting with stuff, but who don’t actually fit the clinical definition of “hoarders.”
So under the sink disorganization had been dogging me for quite some time. We’ve had some leaks over the past while, so that kind of prevented me from figuring out any kind of organization solution. I went away a couple weeks back and just before I left the right sink was super leaky, so my boyfriend replaced the gaskets for both sinks, so now they are leak-free (yay).
Perfect time to re-organize things underneath the sink. I had bought an under the sink organizer from Canadian Tire a while back for our small bathroom sink, and it worked out really well, so I got another one on sale (they occasionally go down to $6.99) and installed it in the kitchen.
But first I cleaned out the inside under the sink and got rid of a bunch of waterlogged supplies that went skunky as well as some cleaning supplies that were practically empty.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s pretty damned good for now. I can get to all the things without digging through the old pile of stuff. And if I find something better down the road, I can always disassemble and use it somewhere else in the house. I sometimes like to look under the sink to revel in my new kitchen neatness. One small kitchen battle won!
My kitchen is finally unfucked. This wasn’t an easy task…here are a few before shots to give you an idea of how awful it truly was.
Because I have a tiny kitchen, I need to be careful not to bring too many things into it, and I have to be pretty strategic with storage. The bins between the sink and stove are for recycling. The baker’s rack is from Target and was a fantastic investment. Today, I got rid of anything that I haven’t used in 4 or so months…and I’m officially enacting a self-imposed 24 hour rule for dirty dishes.
Whew. Now onto the final frontier: my bedroom.
(You can see my unfucked living room here)
I spent all weekend at home, cleaning. It feels SO good to have a clean apartment again. Ahhhhh.
These pictures are making me realize that I need more artwork, though.
Reblogging for people who missed it the first time around.
I’ve had a few people ask how to vertically fold their T-shirts so that more fit in the drawer and you don’t have to pull out a whole stack to find one shirt. I’ve put together a truly crappy picture tutorial to try to demonstrate. (Please keep in mind that photography is not my strong suit. Obviously.)
First, lay the T-shirt with the printed side down:
Then, fold one side in toward the middle:
Repeat on the other side:
Fold the bottom third of the shirt up, usually to right below where the arms are:
Fold the bottom up again:
This is what it looks like when flipped over (from the front):
And this is what a stack of them in a drawer (or an Ikea storage box) looks like:
I didn’t plan to clean my room today but I ended up with a free afternoon and frankly couldn’t stand it anymore
so THIS
became THIS
THIS
became THIS
THIS
became THIS
and THIS
became THIS
I even got myself a proper shoe rack! And I organized the other side of my closet but it’s just filled with boxes and doesn’t look much different than it did when I started so no photos of that.
In other news, I need my own place. I’m outgrowing this room.
Good job!
I’ve had a few people ask how to vertically fold their T-shirts so that more fit in the drawer and you don’t have to pull out a whole stack to find one shirt. I’ve put together a truly crappy picture tutorial to try to demonstrate. (Please keep in mind that photography is not my strong suit. Obviously.)
First, lay the T-shirt with the printed side down:
Then, fold one side in toward the middle:
Repeat on the other side:
Fold the bottom third of the shirt up, usually to right below where the arms are:
Fold the bottom up again:
This is what it looks like when flipped over (from the front):
Now, the trick is, instead of putting a stack of them in the drawer so that you only see the top shirt in a stack, put them in the drawer almost like a bookcase or filing cabinet, so the the folded “spines” of the shirts are visible when you open the drawer.
And this is what a stack of them in a drawer (or an Ikea storage box) looks like:
Wonderful Team Unfuck Your Habitat,
I have come to a conclusion about what plagues my attempts to completely unfuck my habitat. Especially the cupboards and shelves. And I have also seen through many of your posts that I’m not the only one with this issue. And that issue is:
Where the hell should I put this?!
A lot of unfucking is concerned with putting away things. But it becomes very hard when you don’t have a designated place for them. For the longest time my reusable shopping bags would lay on top of chairs in the kitchen/dining room. On top, beside, below. Always in my way but I never knew where else I could put them. If I placed them all somewhere in a corner of the kitchen, I would often forget to take them with me and use them. After thinking long and hard, I finally figured to put all of the reusable bags into one and place it in the wardrobe by the front door. Now, they are out of my way, and also in an easy to see and reach place that I don’t forget to take them and put them back.
But it took a long time and lots of trial and error to designate a proper place for them.
Any time I would “designate” a place for them, they would migrate or cease to be used for intended purposes. That also made keeping my habitat unfucked a LOT harder.
And this is what I want to as of you Team UfYH:
What best designated places you have found for stuff around your house?
Where do you keep your cleaning supplies so they are easy to access when needed and easy to put away and don’t migrate? Did you notice that when designating a place for something it would migrate to another place after a while? I already saw that another member of Team UfYH had a similar issue with migrating oil. Originally they intended to place the cooking oil on the top shelves, but because they used it often it soon migrated to the lowest shelf simply because it was easier to quickly take and put away. This of course made their once unfucked shelves fucked again, until they re-designated where stuff should stay to a more user friendly layout.
I know I’m not the only one that hasn’t figured out such things and they take time and trial and error. And that’s why I’m hoping that we can share our experiences and instead of each individually finding out the bests spots, we could at least give ideas to each other where some of the stuff should go. Because now I have an idea how to unfuck my kitchen cupboard that was once unfucked but got fucked again. Thank you Timeandbananas for the inspiration, thank you UfYH for creating such a wonderful system and community, and thank you Team UfYH for reading this and hopefully for sharing your own experiences.
So my dad has always said, “There’s a place for everything, and everything in its place.” Which is all well and good, and certainly better than a place for nothing and nothing in its place, which is admittedly how I used to operate.
But sometimes we have a place for stuff and it still looks like hell. Case in point, our family shoe storage area by the side door. That’s where the shoes go, and it’s easy to throw them all in there, but it looks like craaaaaaaaap. And things are always spilling out onto the landing, and we really do not have space for that, either!
Before and after pics under the cut. :)
It’s my birthday yesterday! (It’s nearing 1am here, but my birthday is August 17.)
I had a great time: going out for sushi; playing a party game mashup of: pictionary, charades, name that tune!, taboo, and other such things; eating lots of tasty snacks and popsicles. My friends are the best of all possible friends.
I’m also super proud of what we (A. and I) did before the fun and games began: cleaning our vestibule.
Witness our vestibule, a (often very dark) narrow strip of room that was this morning filthy as all get out:
Closeup of the shelves:
Magic: the Gathering cards, water bottles, dirt, shoes underfoot, the perpetual tangle of scarves, more filth… we’d basically ignored the vestibule for months hoping it would go away.
Then we decided that damnit, we were going to clean the darn thing!
Out went the shoes! Not pictured: the cobwebs and one live spider inside the boots. (I got A. to clean those; I’m not ok with spiders.)
I swept the better part of a year’s worth of grime, washed and vacuumed and even wiped down the shelves, which had all of their contents removed and reorganized.
And then, finally, an hour and a half later: BAM!
Oh yeah. Look at that.
Shoes neatly organized.
Our fedoras and sunhat in a row. (There’s a ballcap and beret hiding under the sunhat.)
And the star of our vestibule, the scarf organizer!
That’s a tension rod over which I threaded all of our scarves—and colour coded them! Gloves and additional scarves that didn’t fit are hiding, neatly laid/folded, underneath. I got the tension rod idea from StorageGeek. SO GOOD.
The board games are there because, uh, we lack storage so we make do with where we can put things. But don’t let the Battlestar Galactica box fool you: all the expansions come in the same size box, and we only use one for the actual game. We play BSG (which takes on average 3 hours) at least once a week.
That wood thing on the right in the main shots? That’s a wood coat hanger that looks like this:
We love our Nerf swords! (And the suitcase in some of the previous shots holds A.’s ten Nerf laser tag guns. Yeah, that’s right.)
We also did some other stuff: A. did a bunch of reorganizing in the living room, swept the bathroom floor, I vacuumed—but our basement suite is TINY so none of that took a long time. And I think we followed UFYH’s principles fairly well, even though this was more marathon-y than I’d like: we took breaks. And thanks to UFYH, the kitchen didn’t need any tidying at all, because we’ve been keeping up with it! Ditto on most of the bathroom!
Best part? We both had a lot of fun! We even argued over who got to vacuum, because we both enjoy it so much.
