pausing in flight feels

the bough give way

beneath her feet

and yet sings,

knowing she hath wings.

~ Victor Hugo

 Brenda, a fifty-something woman with teenage children, an active civic life and a full time job requested a home office consultation. Her main problem was that during the two days each week that she worked from home, she took over the dining room table. She wanted to make her office more accessible and reclaim her dining room table for family meals.

The first thing I noticed walking into her office was not the clutter, it was the lack of anything interesting anywhere in sight: not a family photo, not a kindergarten finger painting, not even a houseplant. It was no wonder she never wanted to sit at her desk.

To make a space attractive, organizing is only half the work. If there is nothing that sparkles and shines and reminds you of how much you love and are loved, than the space won’t be compelling, no matter how well organized. Whether it’s grandma’s wedding photo, the collar from a favorite pet dog or shells collected from the shore, objects that inspire are essential to transforming space.

So here’s the plan:

1. Look around your home for a couple of pieces, pictures or paintings that go Ping! Ping! is the sound of inspiration. It happens when objects connect with something deep inside. It might remind you of a childhood friend or a dearly loved grandparent; it might make you smile or chuckle; or it might remind you that you are bigger, bolder and more beautiful than you think you are.
2. Clear and clean a space that can easily be seen from where you spend the most time. If you need to scoop everything in a box for sorting later, so be it. Once you’re inspired, crazy things are possible!
3. Arrange just enough of your Pings! to inspire without cluttering.
4. Once you’ve set up your inspirational space, don’t let it get stale. Notice when you stop noticing (when the Ping! becomes a Pong) and be willing to swap out for another Ping!

Now, breathe deeply and allow inspiration to wash over you! Ping!

My hiatus from tip writing began with a 2-week visit from my middle daughter. As she hadn’t been out east for a couple years, her visit became a 2-week daughter-fest. This was followed by a succession of one-time, time-consuming events, ending last week with magnificent performances of the Bach Mass in B Minor by my chamber chorus.

All were wonderful and fun and joyous reasons to interrupt my normal weekly rhythms. And as I emerge from the last six weeks of delightful disruption, I ponder how to stay on track when events – whether joyous, difficult, sad or just annoying –disrupt the flow of living.

As I often do, I sought advice from the masters; in this case, Deniece Schofield and her book, Confessions of an Organized Housewife. Deniece suggests six household areas which, when maintained, create a sense of peace, even when life’s a little crazy:

• I am able to keep the house picked up.
• I am able to keep the laundry current.
• Meals are well prepared and served regularly.
• The kitchen is usually in good order.
• Bathrooms are cleaned and straightened regularly.
• I am able to keep entry areas clean and tidy.

Your list might look a bit different, but the idea is to not ignore the basics, even when life becomes challenging. Despite my added responsibilities, I somehow found five minutes here and there to put away the dishes, throw in a load of laundry and put something green (that’s not mold) on the table. Sometimes I dressed out of the dryer and flinched when the doorbell rang; but overall, my stress was lower and getting back to normal has been a lot easier.

As I emerge from this extra-busy time, I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do.  But the house is still standing and I’ve had an exceptional-crazy-heartwarming-busy-delightful spring.

And now (thankfully!), back to routine.

Happy spring!

What to do with your V.I.P.s ~ Your Very Important Papers

In honor of tax time, I’ve been running a series on managing paperwork. The amount of paper we receive through snail mail, our kids’ schools and our own work has far outstripped our ability to deal with it. Every one of us needs a personal assistant to handle processing and filing!

In the last two posts I reviewed guidelines for what financial and medical papers to keep and for how long. If you missed any of the series, just scroll down and you’ll find them. Today’s topic is identifying and properly storing your VIPs ~ your Very Important Papers.

Why this obsession with paperwork? Two years ago, the Brooks House, an historic brick building in downtown Brattleboro, burned, destroying much of the top floors’ 59 apartments. Eighteen months ago, homes and businesses were carried away by Irene’s devastating floods. These disasters reminded me how cavalier I can get about my VIPs. If my home burned to the ground, would I still have access to my legal and financial documents? How about my household inventory? If I’m hit with a disaster, do I want the burden of reconstructing my paper trail on top of reconstructing my life?

If you’re like me and haven’t taken the time to identify and properly store your VIP’s, give yourself the gift of Peace of Mind by identifying and properly storing your Very Important Papers.

First let’s identify what a Very Important Paper looks like. Your VIP’s are:

• Legal and Probate papers; including wills, marriage and divorce documents, birth and death certificates and adoption papers.
• Advance Directives; including Living Wills and Durable Powers of Attorney.
• Any papers or records that prove ownership; such as property titles and deeds, auto titles and stock and bond certificates.
• Household inventories of furniture, jewelry, valuables, including valuable collections and appraisals.
• Any additional papers that would be expensive, difficult or impossible to replace or to which you would need immediate access if a disaster occurred.

Make of copy of each document and file it with your household records. Better yet, scan each document and create back up discs. You can earn extra brownie points by taking a panoramic video of each room of the house. This will help you reconstruct missing pieces and jog your memory if ever it is necessary. The originals, the disc with the scanned copies and copy of the video should live in a safety deposit box at your bank or a fireproof home safe.

Hopefully, you’ll never experience the kind of disaster that would make safe storage necessary. But if you do, you’ll know that you bought yourself the right kind of insurance – Peace of Mind.

Next time ~ Where to put it all: storage solutions for paperwork.

In my last post in the series, “What the heck you do with all that paper?” I reviewed the keep vs. shred guidelines for financial papers. I heard from a couple of you about special circumstances where my advice wasn’t 100% accurate; self employment being one. So, my caveat: if you have special situations, please consult your accountant.

This week we’re tackling which medical records you need to keep. Every visit to the doctor, pharmacy transaction and insurance payment generates paper. Most of these papers end up either in the trash (often unopened) or in the nearly-toppling-over-figure-out-or-file-pile. So, here’s the plan:

There are four categories of medical information you need to pay attention to:

1. Prescription information: Include drug name and dosage, refill dates,  number of refills remaining and one copy of the drug information fact sheet the pharmacy gives you, which is good for identifying drug interactions and side effects.
2. General health: Don’t go overboard, because up to date information about almost anything is available on the internet or from your practitioner. Keep only information that you know you’ll want to refer to.
3. Specific medical condition information for each family member, with separate sub-files for each condition or each family member.
4. Health insurance information: Include payments and authorizations, services covered by your insurance company and doctors that participate in your health plan.

Make four file folders labeled with the four categories listed above. All of your health information should fit into one of these file folders. You may also decide to include manila folders within each of the four folders, on for each family member.

Here are some general guidelines to determine how long to keep these records:

• If you take the itemized deduction on your taxes, keep records of insurance payments with tax records for 7 years; otherwise, discard them after 1 year.
• Insurance policies: keep only the most recent update of current policies.
• Immunization records, operations, doctor, lab and hospital reports: permanent.

Next time: Handling your VIP’s: What to do with your Very Important Papers.

Conquer Your Paper Overwhelm

Every other year at this time (this time meaning tax season) I like to run a series on dealing with paper. For most of us, the amount of paper we handle on a day to day basis far exceeds our ability to manage it. It is, by far, the biggest issue faced by Breathing Space clients and readers. So trust me, you’re not alone if you feel as though you’re about to be buried by a mountain of paper.

Often I hear from clients some version of, “I have an attic full of old checks and financial papers. How long do I have to keep them?” Here’s the low-down on what financial papers to keep and what you can safely shred. Caveat: I’m not an accountant; so if you have special circumstances, please check with a Certified Public Accountant.

• Tax returns and supporting documents: 7 years.
• Check registers and canceled checks: 1 year, unless tax related.
• Deposit/ATM/debit slips: Discard after reviewing monthly statement, unless tax related.
• Bank statements: One month, or long enough to check that all transactions are accurate; unless the statement is your only record of a tax related transaction.
• Credit card receipts: Discard after reviewing monthly statement, unless tax related.
• Credit card statements: Shred as soon as you check the accuracy of the statement, unless tax related.
• Investment statements: Keep end of year summaries 7 years after you close the account; discard monthly or quarterly statements when you receive end of year summary.
• Investment buy/sale confirmations and purchase records: 7 years after sale of security
• Pay Stubs: Until you receive your W-2
• Stock & bond certificates: Keep in safe deposit box as long as you own the security
• W-2’s: Until you begin claiming Social Security. W-2’s are a great way to estimate earnings and entitlements

With on-line banking, it’s important to check how long statements and check images will be available to you. Make hard copies or save them as documents if necessary.

Some of you will breathe a sigh of relief, because this is exactly what you’ve been doing. But I expect many of you will find that you’ve saved far more paper than you need. But don’t try to pare down the whole pile at once. Instead, grab a box of old paperwork, a shredder and an old movie (Jimmy Stewart anyone?) and deal with one box, or even one handful at a time. Use the skills you’ve learned here to stay on track: get an accountability buddy and make sorting appointments with yourself. Set a target date for finishing and then work backward to see how many boxes you need to tackle each week. And finally, remember to breathe!

Bonus question: What papers pose the biggest sorting challenge for you? Reply to this post with your answer and I’ll try to address it in a future post!

The barn's yarn stash

The steps I took to organize my yarns were similar to those outlined by Joanna (the founder of Breathing Space) in her book, Decluttering 101, with a few tweaks to fit this project. I hope that those non-knitters among you will be able to translate these steps into other organizing projects that involve sorting materials of various kinds.

1)   I cleared a space to sort onto (in this case, my bed). I opted not to cover the bed with a clean sheet, as recommended by Joanna. I regret this, as the yarn was messier than I’d expected (especially the stash in which a clever mouse had hidden her winter’s supply of seeds).

2)   I gathered all my yarns from around the house and barn.

The sorted fibers

3)   I sorted the fibers into piles. The categories I chose were cottons, wools, blends, “fuzzies,” and as-yet-unknitted sweater wool. Another knitter might have sorted by color or weight. Your sorting should reflect the way you plan to use the materials.

4)   Because I knit prayer shawls from scrap wool, I have a reason to keep bits and pieces. I decided that I wouldn’t keep any ball smaller than 1 inch in diameter. Another knitter might use different criteria. Setting criteria for what to keep and what to toss is essential to this process.

5)   I bagged the sorted yarns together in large zip-bags and stored them in clean plastic bins. I still need to research a safe anti-moth solution to keep away unwelcome visitors.

Yarns, sorted and bagged

I started work on my knitting tools – needles, stitch holders and so forth. I’ll finish up that part of the project this week and report in on my next blog post.

I’m curious how you folks out there have tackled organizing your projects. Please share your challenges and successes with all of us. Hobbies are so much more enjoyable when you can find what you’re looking for!

Last weekend I reviewed my organizing map and target dates (see my last blog post). By now I should have completed organizing my knitting supplies and gotten rid of the defunct electronics. To date, it’s Chaos 2, Sue 0. So much for target dates.

Lesson learned: Just because I put a date on the calendar doesn’t mean I get the work done.

Second lesson learned: Get more realistic about how much time I really have.

Third lesson learned: Don’t be so hard on myself.

It’s the second of these lessons that I want to look at here. When I scheduled to work on my knitting supplies two weekends ago, I looked at my calendar and thought, “No problem. Daughter Ruth is graduating from college on Sunday; I’ll have plenty of time to complete that organizing project on Saturday.” Yeah, right. Graduation on Sunday meant traveling to Boston on Saturday for her art opening at 5:00. My ever-hopeful, magical-thinking brain still thought I’d have plenty of time (are you beginning to see a pattern here?).

To make the art opening at 5:00 I had to leave Vermont at 1:00. Still, no problem. But then I remembered that I hadn’t done any of the weekly housecleaning. And the “plenty of time” I thought I had disappeared into a bottle of spray cleaner.

A similar “plenty of time” mishap occurred this past weekend. This time the organizing project took second place to our traditional gardening weekend. Although my magical-thinking-plenty-of-time brain figured I’d just squeeze in a little organizing on the side, reality had other plans.

Was doing these next steps in my barn organization project just not a high enough priority for me? I don’t think so. I do think that I wasn’t acknowledging that there is “a time for every purpose under heaven;” and the purpose of these last two weekends were graduating a daughter from college and planting a vegetable garden.

In reflecting back, there are three questions that will help determine in the future whether my target dates and organizing map are truly doable.

1. What else is on my plate?
2. What do I have to say “No” to in order to say “Yes” to my plan?
3. Is there preparation that I can do ahead of time to make the project easier?

I’m going to use these questions this weekend and see if I can’t make more progress on my plan. I’ll report back how well they worked next week.

If you give my reality check questions a try, let us all know how they worked for you.

Embarking on this organizing adventure, I’m reminded of all the trips I’ve taken over the years. Even after the advent of the GPS, I begin my trips by pulling out a map. Without a map it’s easy for me to get lost. In truth, I get lost even with a map, but at least a map gives me a reference point. It keeps me focused on my destination and points out landmarks along the way.

When you’re embarking on an organizing adventure, you also need a map. If you’re heading into difficult territory or planning to move through several different spaces, a map will keep you motivated and focused on your desired outcome.

As with most trips, you first need to determine your destination. With an organizing map the destination is both the finished effort and the target date. The towns along the way are the projects which take you one step closer to completion. The map also helps you determine how much time, money and energy the “trip” will take: how many hours you’ll need to set aside, what the cost with be in shelving and containers and where the energy landmines might be.

My first organizing adventure is cleaning out the 2^nd story of my barn. I’d like to complete this by the time I leave for vacation the 3^rd week of August ~ thus, my destination/target date. I’ve broken my adventure into discrete projects, each of which should take me less than 3 hours. This helps keep me focused, on task and (hopefully) avoiding overwhelm.

The first four stops, with target dates, on my organizing adventure are:

• 5/20: Knitting projects and yarn stash ~ culled and organized
• 5/27: Electronics (old TV’s, etc.) to recycling
• 6/3: Pull together all the various organizing bins that are stashed up there so that I know what I have to work with and what I need to purchase
• 6/10-17 (week off): Build shelves, chorale the kids’ boxes and set dates with the kids when they will consolidate (and maybe cart away) their stuff

I’ve written my projects in my calendar and scheduled time to work on them. With this map I’ll know where I’m going, how to get there and when I get off track. Without a map it’s just wandering around looking for a place to eat.

So, what’s your summer organizing adventure?

Happy map making!

Mom wasn’t big on organizing. Yet somehow she managed a happy home with a happy kind of chaos. Here’s some of the organizing advice I picked up from her:

• Never let organizing get in the way of living.
• If there’s a bird at the bird feeder and you’re doing housework, drop everything and grab your binoculars; even if it’s a robin, guaranteed it’s more interesting than the housework.
• Be well enough organized to do what you want to do. Anything more is just excessive.
• The only good reason to dig into an organizing project is if it’s time for Mr. Rogers.

Despite these finely tuned organizing strategies, my childhood home was never outrageously disorganized. How did she accomplish this with 5 children and a somewhat old-world husband who, to this day, is not sure which end of the vacuum cleaner to plug in? Among her carefully guarded secrets were:

• Get help: We were fortunate to live near several colleges and regularly had students in to help babysit and clean. Besides the much needed help around the house, we all learned to play a mean hand of poker.
• Count: Never fold more than 10 pieces of laundry or put away 10 pieces of miscellany without looking out the window to see if anything interesting has landed in the yard.
• Containerize: Although she never called it this, we had baskets of sorted stuff throughout the house. This made finding and putting away a lot easier. It also provided good use for the baskets and odd copper pieces that she brought home from antiquing.
• Simplify: Mom always sought the most direct route from point A and point B (unless we were taking Sunday afternoon walks – which became known as “Sallymeanderings). For example, a key element of her life advice to me was to install a laundry-shoot. I also learned that leftovers are much tastier when eaten directly out of their containers while standing in front of the fridge ~ but I digress.
• Finally, laugh: Because humor, especially a good pun, is the balm that sorts out any degree of disorganization.
• 
  With love,
  Sally’s daughter, Sue

When last we left our heroine, she was sitting in the counting house, counting out her bags of STUFF. Today we find her suddenly remembering that it’s Wednesday, and she was supposed to blog on Monday. Better late than never.

The question of the week is, “Am I Cleaning or am I Decluttering?” My biggest issue in decluttering my home is that I spend all my would-be-decluttering time cleaning. It’s a 200+ year old farm house and attracts dirt and cobwebs like a six year old attracts scraped knees.

The precipitating event is daughter #5, Hannah’s imminent return home from college. Despite the promises that I made myself that I wouldn’t clean up after the confusion she left over spring break, I couldn’t leave the dust and the clutter just lying there. So, Sunday became Clean Out Hannah’s Room Day. It really didn’t take all day – perhaps an hour or two. But that was an hour or two that I told myself I’d purge the next victim on my list of rooms.

When it came to writing to you, dear Reader, about my decluttering progress this week, I had to ask if what I did could be called decluttering or if it was just cleaning? Okay, not a question to rock the world. But if I’m going to make progress this year in purging my house, it’s something I need to be clear about.

So what is decluttering (besides a word that my spell check tells me doesn’t exist)? In my book, decluttering involves

• Sorting
• Purging
• Creating space that is suited to each item’s use
• Restoring sanity

Although we sort things and return them to their designated spots when we clean, it’s a different kind of sorting than we do when we declutter. When we clean, we’re generally not getting rid of anything but garbage. When we declutter, the point is to reduce the amount of stuff, and so we sort things into piles of keep, goes elsewhere, get rid of, don’t know and toss out. And as it’s difficult to do this with someone else’s stuff ~too many of those decisions are personal ~ I have to conclude that although her bedroom needs decluttering, that wasn’t what I was doing on Sunday. I was simply restoring sanity (mine), and making a welcoming environment for her homecoming.

But despite this, my bag count has increased. I’d been storing several bags of clothes for possible resale. Daughter #1, Claire, was sorting through some of them in search of a shirt. She challenged me to forget about consigning the clothes and just give them away. After a moment’s hesitation, I consented. Although there was a touch of angst when I brought them to the local donation center, the relief of not having to process them overrode any regret.

Thus, the count – which, for clarity’s sake, is only for household purging projects, not weekly household garbage and recycling:

Total garbage bags to date: 3

Total recycling bags to date: 2

Total donation bags to date: 13

Total boxes of books to date: 3

Until next week … Sue