Jed-Development

Posts Tagged ‘home’

You’ve gotten your house nicely organized and you’ve developed habits to keep it that way. Good for you! One more thing is necessary for an organized life—learning to control how you use your time. It’s not hard, once you know how. Organized people understand the two secrets that make it easy and guarantee success. They focus on priorities and divvy up their time wisely to reach them. That means, you simply must:
• Say no to less-important, C-list priorities. We have so many opportunities and so many demands on our time in today’s busy world. That makes it important to practice saying no to the requests of other people and often to our own desires as well. We don’t have the time or the energy to do everything. That means we have to ignore what we may call our C list, in favor of giving our attention to what’s essential.
• Shout a resounding yes to a few, well- selected activities in your life—your A- list priorities. When the yes areas are determined, you can say no more easily to other areas, many of which may be excellent activities, but just are not right for you at this time.

A two-car garage covers about five hundred square feet of floor space. That’s about the size of a small apartment! Two parked cars take up half the space in the garage, when you include room for the car doors to open. This leaves a significant amount of room for storage, and (drum roll, please!) it’s the best kind because most is along the walls. To make the most of it. Designate zones, as in other rooms. You may have a building zone for storage of hammers, drills, wrenches, and the like. The garden/lawn zone would include tools hung from hooks on the wall. Sports equipment often fits nicely in a wheeled trash can—labeled, of course—in the sports zone. If you use the garage for general storage for things like games, dog food, decorations, and more, create zones for each category and post signs labeling each zone. That will nudge you—and other family members—to take that extra step and put things away properly after use. Hint: Arrange zones so that items used frequently are near the garage door you use most. Measure spaces carefully before buying storage containers. Keep things off the floor. You can hang things for pennies if you hammer large nails into studs around the walls. Peg Boards keep smaller items neat. Putting things away is a snap if you trace around them, leaving an outline that shows where they should be returned after use. Anything that can’t hang should be in labeled containers, stored neatly on shelves. Lightweight items can go on high shelves; heavy items should stay low. If you can afford them, cabinets with doors create a neater overall look. Put rafters to work. Exposed rafters can hold a multitude of items. Slide skis and ski poles, long and thin sports equipment, even long gardening tools onto a ladder hung horizontally from the ceiling, above your head but within reach. Suspend large tools and sports equipment—especially bicycles—from hooks screwed into the rafters. Make it shine. As you organize, give the garage a good cleaning, discarding things you haven’t used in years. It doesn’t have to be spotless. But the neater it is, the more likely you’ll be to keep it that way. Hint: Make oil stains fade by using your foot to grind unused kitty litter into the greasy spot. After a few hours, sweep up the litter with the oil it has absorbed. Prevent future stains by taping a piece of cardboard over the spot where you normally park. When you want to spruce up, simply change the cardboard for a new piece.