Where Do You Keep That (Part Three)

This series would be faster if I took one long video of me walking through our house opening every closet, cupboard, and drawer.

Instead I’m opting to write things out, so here is another long-winded post in my Where Do You Keep That series?

(Part One, Part Two)

After my original post Maria asked me to discuss where I put things I struggle to know where to put!

Usually, if in doubt, I put miscellaneous things in our storage room. Out of sight = mostly out of mind. A few times a year, the clutter gets to be too much and we ruthlessly go through things in this space. But that tends to be the “catch-all” location for items that don’t have an obvious home. There is also a small drawer beside our dishwasher that isn’t very functional because you can’t open it if the dishwasher is closed. If I’m too lazy to take something downstairs and it will fit in that drawer, I might toss it in there. Every few months I go through the contents and either find a permanent home for the item or, more likely, trash or donate it. (This is often where I put art projects we’re not going to keep but I can’t throw away because they’ve come home too recently.)

LAUNDRY BASKETS

The kids each have one in their room (Belle in her closet; Indy under his desk). John and I share one which is in the corner of our bedroom.

ITEMS TO DONATE

This was a great question from Erica.

We thrift a lot of home goods and clothing, and we also donate a lot of home goods and clothing. We like to upcyle; if we find something thrifted that will be a good replacement for something we already own, we may swap it. Plus, our kids grow out of clothing and shoes quickly!

In general, when I see something I want to donate on our main floor (we live in a bungalow, so there is a main floor + basement), I put it in a small laundry basket I keep in the bottom of my closet. Every few days I’ll take a load of upstairs items downstairs – not only donations go in here, if I have dryer balls to return to the laundry room or our upstairs handvacuum if it needs to be charged (the charger stays in the basement).

The items that are donations go into a box or bag that lives on the bottom shelf of a unit in our furnace room. When we’re going to a thrift store, we’ll load up a box or bag of donations. We donate almost exclusively to a local thrift store that gives a coupon for 20% off your next purchase when you drop off a donation.

If I have clothes to go to consignment, I’ll keep that bag on a shelf in my bedroom closet. If I’m giving hand-me-downs to someone, ditto – I’ll fill a bag and keep it on a shelf in my closet until I’m ready to pass it along.

KIDS STUFF

Erica also asked: “How do you keep your kids from accumulating infinite stuff? Somehow mine have a massive amount of junk that I did not actually buy them; they get it from parties and friends and school and the dentist and possibly their bodies just attract cheap plastic garbage like magnets…“

I don’t keep my kids from accumulating infinite stuff. It happens. It drives me crazy. And I think it is virtually impossible to avoid.

Ways we help minimize the impact of said clutter.

• Until Belle was a teen, I had a pretty big say in how she managed items in her room. We would go through her shelves, under-the-bed totes and closet fairly regularly and get rid of things she no longer had sentimental attachment too/had outgrown. I have a pretty good sense of what my kids are attached to, so I would sometimes take items out that I knew wouldn’t be missed (and keep them in a box in the basement for a few months in case they were missed). Now that she’s 13, she largely manages everything about her room. I ask her to make her bed a few times a week, but it’s not a priority for her, and she’s old enough to make that decision for herself. She loves to collect items and she has lovely built-in shelves that are COVERED in things. She likes it, so I let her live that way. Truly random items – like party favours, Perler bead projects – tend to live in clear glass containers on her shelves. It allows her to keep little things, but they become a bit of an art form due to the holding container.

• Indy is younger and I still have some say over what he keeps. I’ll throw out things that are clearly broken or unusable, and I try to sort various small objects into a drawer organizer in his closet to at least keep them quasi-contained.
• Our kids don’t have many toys (never did) and I’ve kept VERY few toys from their childhood. A handful of board books, a small stack of puzzles, a teaset, one little tote of Playmobil and another of wooden blocks (I bring these out when we have guests with younger children and these items live in our guest room in a chest of drawers). Current items mostly consist of Indy’s LEGO, Nerf supplies, and a set for laser tag which are all stored in our dedicated toy area in our downstairs family room.

• Kid’s items go in kid’s rooms. I remember reading – years and years ago – a book about French parents that said, in essence, you can walk into many French homes and not realize children live there. That sounds rather cold and uninviting but now that my kids are older, all their things are to be out of the living room at the end of the day. We used to have a basket of books in our living room when they were younger, but even then – toys and trinkets were stored in bedrooms, not other parts of the house.

All this said, there is a never-ending supply of papers and gifts and stickers and I wish I could turn the tide and change a lot societal pressures for consumerism, but I also realize that kids have very limited spheres of control and one thing they CAN control (theoretically) is their own things. Having ownership is important and gives them a sense of independence and responsibility. So I try to balance the line of not wanting my house to be overrun and wanting to promote minimalism in the sense that “let’s only have things we love for aesthetic or practical or sentimental reasons” (not just to hoard things) while also wanting them to have some agency.

PAPER STORAGE

Our office!

Archived business receipts (we have to keep them seven years for our corporation) and all related documents are in the bottom drawer of one of the dressers (much cheaper than filing cabinets). Top drawer = current business and person receipts, warranty forms, tags for anything that might be returned.

Old personal tax returns are organized into envelopes by year in a box in the bottom of the office closet. We have two accordion file folders. One is for archived items (stock options paperwork, old government documents, life insurance policies, medical files) and the other is for current items.

One of my monthly to-do’s is going through receipts and paperwork. It accumulates for four weeks and then I spend a bit of time putting each item where it needs to go. Setting up the systems took a fair amount of effort, but the payoff now is incredible. I love knowing exactly where every piece of paperwork should go and then, when I need something, knowing exactly where to look.

Any paperwork that is especially valuable – our passports, birth certificates, marriage license, deed to the house, power of attorney/will – is kept in a locked fireproof safe.

GARBAGE CANS

Basically every single room – except the living/dining room, the guest room (which feels like an oversight?), and the downstairs family room. Every bathroom, every bedroom (guest aside), the office, the laundry room, the kitchen, and the storage room all have garbage areas.

RECYCLING

We have a bag on one of our kitchen cupboard doors for trash.

Plastics, metal, glass and Styrofoam (where we live these are all “plastic” recyclables) go into a wash basin that lives under our kitchen sink. Indy is responsible for garbage, so every few days I pull it out and he takes it downstairs to the furnace room and sorts it (refundable cans go in one bag, all the other plastics into the other).

Paper and cardboard go into another tote under our kitchen sink. Ditto above about Indy taking it downstairs.

We also have a compost program. We save cardboard boxes from cereal and crackers and keep one in our freezer and that’s where we dispose of all our food scraps. It helps prevent fruit flies, smells, and when one box gets full it can be added directly into the compost bin which is collected every two weeks from the end of our driveway. (Same with trash and recyclables; it’s collected on a two-week schedule).

TUPPERWARE AND STORAGE CONTAINERS

I really should downsize these containers, but I don’t know what to get rid of and am mostly just waiting for things to break and then I won’t replace them or I’ll update to glass. This is where we keep all the dishes for leftovers and school lunches. I took this picture when the kids were at school, but normally this is where we store their lunchboxes. Glass baking pans (like 9x13s) are in another cupboard.

RAPID FIRE

Sports supplies. These are divided between a tote outside, a tote inside (within our PAX), and a wooden chest in our furnace room.

Broom and mop? These are also in the PAX right inside our entryway.

Office supplies. One of the chest of drawers in our office. Things like paper, envelopes, extra tape, paperclips, pens – they all live here.

Travel supplies. We keep our luggage in our closet, our basement storage area, and then all our travel-sized toiletries are in a drawer in our main bathroom.

Sheets? Also in one of the drawers in our bathroom. I only have one extra sheet per bed in the house (and only fitted because we all sleep without a top sheet).

Backstock. We have two pantries in the upstairs of our house. Both are relatively small (no walk-ins), so our extra canned goods, rice, pasta, chips, granola bars, oatmeal, coffee filters etc, etc, go on some shelves in our furnace room/storage area. Belle organized these shelves months ago with labels and everything has stayed so neat and tidy. Gold stars to her! It had been a bit chaotic before that.

Phew. That’s a relatively comprehensive tour of where we store common items in our house! Did I miss anything? Your turn. Where do you keep backstock? Office supplies? Your broom and mop?

Header photo by Uliana Kopanytsia on Unsplash