I can’t believe I’m going to share a picture of my kitchen drawer with you, but whenever I come across an organizing tip that actually works, it’s hard to resist sharing the news. My sister gave me the idea, which she got from a book about organizing your stuff. I think it might have been The life-changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondō.

Downsizing and organizing seem to be popular themes these days. For the past month, I’ve been watching my recently retired neighbor hall things from her basement to either the trash or a pile destined for Goodwill. On the other side of me a neighbor unloaded some tomato cages, two of which I gladly took. There are entire podcasts devoted to convincing you to get rid of stuff.

Generally, the rule here is “Don’t let it in the house.” But swept up in the celebration of the team’s new logo, I caved and took a free Timberwolves t-shirt that was shoved into my hands on the way out of the arena. It wasn’t a good color for me. I didn’t like the cut. Was it supposed to be a souvenir? Fortunately I have some neighbors who are Wolves fans and they were happy to take the shirt and some other souvenirs. Basically we’re just trading stuff over here.

Another trick is to “Use things up.” When you get that candle on Christmas Day, get the matches out. Light it. Enjoy it every day until it’s gone. If you save it, pretty soon you’ll have two candles and then three. People will get the idea that you collect candles. Then you’ll get even more until you won’t live long enough to burn them all. So use the lotion. Eat the candy. Drink the wine. If it’s not for you, give it away right away. I mean, nobody wants a box of half eaten candies or a candle that was lit once and then stored where it collected dust until it came time for your estate sale.

For the stuff you do keep. Put it away. Even if it’s ultimately a contained mess like my kitchen drawer with the food storage containers, having a place to put things is a start. Until recently, I saw no reason to improve this isolated chaos. It was easy to toss things in willy-nilly and not such a big deal to fish things out as needed.

But when my sister mentioned this storage method where you store things vertically, I wondered if would work for this drawer. I arranged things and it worked great. The real test would be whether the system could more or less maintain itself. After having used this organizing tip for several months now, I’m hooked. It works for socks. It works for t-shirts (should you collect too many freebies). Towels. It works great. It also indicates when it’s time to recycle deli containers I might save. If it doesn’t fit, it’s out. Not wedged in. Not off into an auxiliary storage area. Out.

So here you have it folks.

My kitchen drawer.

My kitchen drawer. The container lids are stacked vertically in a shoe box.

When I was a young adult, I had friends who were devout Amway distributers. My former church youth counselors, Frank and Mary Ellen, took the vitamins, used the laundry soap and personal care products and they aspired to become Amway Diamonds, which meant a lifetime of financial security. They could retire early.

So it was Mary Ellen who first gave me an education on laundry detergent “filler”. Amway’s product didn’t have it. While somewhat ironic and perhaps true, Mary Ellen the Amway dealer considered commercial laundry soaps to be a total scam where a pound of sawdust was sold with every pound of soap. Since then I have watched boxes of Tide and other brand-name laundry detergents mysteriously shrink by about two thirds.

A Sample of non-toxic laundry soap from a Community POWER recipient

Recipe: Non-Toxic Laundry Soap

Flash forward to a presentation of the 2011 Community POWER grant recipients where I was giving a report on a residential composting initiative I coordinated. There I heard about one project that set out to debunk the more-toxic-more-suds-the-cleaner hoax and taught residents how to economize while reducing their environmental impact by – for one thing – making their own laundry detergent. I went home with a sample of the detergent and I tried it for the first time last week.

This cheese grater did not work very well for cheese. But it worked great for soap.

In the load that I did using the sample, there were a few soap flakes that did not dissolve. It wasn’t the end of the world, but certainly not something you can expect the average person to accept. I’m wondering if this can be resolved when I make a new batch of detergent with more finely grated soap. As I recall from the presentation, any bar of soap will do. However, I’ve noticed that other recipes favor Fels-Naptha soap. I’m going to use what I have.

Here are other recipes for laundry detergent you could try:

• The Real Housewives of Minnesota
• Just a Pinch

Less soap. Less Money. Less Space.

3 TBLS is enough for a large load. Normally I would have used 1 scoop. Either way, if you’re not reading the directions and measuring the soap, you are most likely wasting money.

As a bonus, in addition to using less product (1-3 TBS), the powder fits in less space.

One blogger assures us that the lack of suds you’ll notice when using your homebrew is not a problem. She’s right. In the 1960’s marketers pushed suds as a way to tell that the soap was working. Today, we’re warned that too many suds indicate overuse. In addition, high efficiency washers have created a demand for low-suds products again. Marketing fads can be confusing.

Writer Michael Pollan says “Don’t eat what you see on television.” Given the detergent filler Mary Ellen warned me about 20+ years ago and a deceptive suds campaign that added no value but only aimed to distinguish one product from another one just like it, and given the overall advertising tactics that are turning us into neurotic Lysol junkies, I wonder if we shouldn’t apply that rule to all products advertised on television: Don’t buy them.

I think I’ll try it. 2014. Resolve to be Clean.

Links

The Soap Conflict, Thomas WhiteSide, The New Yorker, 1964.
“As the level of detergent suds in the American kitchen approached the stifling point a counter-movement set in. It started with a detergent called All; Procter & Gamble then put out Dash, with ‘low suds’ & ‘safe suds.’ Were suds good or bad?”

Vintage Commercials

Low Suds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1YTHr4mTQA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl7V8DGfGpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWgIyywz4cg

Without Bleach or Bluing

With Bleach

Plastic bags with the morning paper are optional.

To avoid the plastic bags that come with our newspaper subscription, we are getting a Star Tribune newspaper tube. It’s such an easy solution for something that has been bugging me a long time. It just took a phone call to the Strib (612) 673-4343.

We went to Rapid City for Christmas and, motivated by a book I found while there, I returned ready to take a closer look at our home to see what might be encroaching on our corner of paradise.

Peter Walsh’s workbook, “It’s All Too Much”, begins with an assessment that would suggest that a family intervention isn’t imminent.

“Do you need to clear off the kitchen counter to prepare a meal?”

No.

“Do you regularly misplace your car keys or checkbook?”

No.

“Do you have to remove laundry… to get to your bed?”

Not usually.

Yet there’s a reason why I walked out of Books-A-Million with a receipt. We have kitchen gadgets that we do not use. I couldn’t do my taxes tomorrow without taking a day to gather the necessary papers and I feel daunted by a stash of plastic bags that is ever growing thanks to our newspaper subscription.

I was also drawn to some of the exercises in the book. The “I might need it one day” and the “It’s worth a lot of money” excuses for hanging on to stuff are quickly neutralized. Not being a huge hoarder myself, I was surprised to notice that I relied on some of them. It was liberating to be ready with a sensible response:

“If I can’t use it today, right now, for who I am in the life I am living, I don’t need it.”

As clutter piles up over time it becomes invisible. So, in the “What I see – What I’d like to see” exercise where you note in detail what is in each room, you learn to see again.

The “Room Function Chart” was another eye-opening exercise. Room by room you are to note the current and ideal function of a space. Based on that, you can determine what is needed and what must go. Doing this exercise, I discovered that our office was serving too many functions. I had been struggling to find a credenza/armoire/cabinet with very specific dimensions and features so that we could reduce the footprint of stereo cabinets and whatnot on the crowded floor. But then I realized that if we quit using the office/video-audio studio/guestroom for overflow clothing, there would be ample room to serve these other purposes. As a bonus, the search for furniture that doesn’t exist could finally stop.

We need to live within the space that we have. I have always believed in Rule #1 and for the most part we do okay. We certainly aren’t paying for storage, which was the subject of a sermon at my parents’ church back in Rapid. The preacher said, “We fill our houses to the brim, packing every closet until we can’t get into them anymore. We stuff the attic with things we will soon forget. When that’s full, we move boxes we never unpacked from our last move into the garage. Then we rent climate-controlled storage space. If it weren’t for the bill, we would forget about that too. Why do we need so much stuff?”

Rule #2 prioritizes the use of space. So, not only do we have to live within the space that we have, the space must make it possible to easily do what we want to do. Keeping this in mind, it is suddenly much easier to choose between a few jackets that I never wear and having easy access to my collection of taped interviews.

I don’t wear them. They’re out.

While difficult to overcome the temptation to move clutter from one spot to another, I won’t be able to do that now without remembering Rule #3: “One room’s clutter is still another room’s clutter.” So, I have a nice little pile of stuff accumulating for the Goodwill, the used bookstore, and Craig’s List.

As I worked through some very tiring exercises, I thought of friends for whom clutter is a constant issue and considered whether this book might be a nice centerpiece to a support group. It might be. I thought of people who are relocating to warmer climates or with a job and who have no choice but to look at and handle absolutely everything they own. Whether they decide to pack it all up or dispose of certain things in one way or another before loading the truck and moving on to the next chapter, they’ll have to make a lot of decisions. I wonder what I would decide about the shoebox full of dried out pens that occupy prime real estate in my closet.