Decrease Clutter with a Permanent Station for Transient Items
12 Oct
By Jason Fitzpatrick, 12:00 PM on Sun Oct 4 2009, 11,764 views
Organizing things that have a permanent home isn’t that difficult. Assign a space and be disciplined about returning the item. What about transient, outgoing items like library books, loaners from friends, and so on? Create a station for them.
The items themselves aren’t permanent, in fact they’ll all be on their way soon enough to the library, the video store, or the donation bin at the local thrift store soon enough. In the mean time however, you’ll be able to keep a much tidier home if these homeless items aren’t roaming free.
At design and organization blog The Red Chair, they advocate creating a permanent station for your transient items. Their solution is to use some basic wire storage cubes and cardboard banker’s boxes which keeps the total cost of their station at around $25. You may opt to go for a more elegant solution for your home or to stash your station in the hall closet out of sight.
If you have a similar station already, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Ahh, I’ve been trying to de-clutter our house a bit, and DEFINITELY need something like this for day-to-day use. I think the bigger thing that tends to get us are the items that don’t really require ACTION per se, but need to be filed, scanned, or something similar.
We have been trying to move toward a more digital repository of documents and such, with frequent backups since bills and other information is included, but that doesn’t stop the deluge of paper-based crap that comes in the mail, and some companies are still in the ice-age and don’t have a good way to pay online/get bills online. So, those bills come in and once they’re paid, there’s still the task of scanning and filing in our electronic filing cabinet. Tedious, and not at ALL what I want to do on any given afternoon or weekend.
Sooo, while this is a great idea, and may help clear up some of the clutter, it’s probably not going to get the biggest source of clutter taken care of, unfortunately 
No comments yet