Personal Organizer: Day Three

I spent five hours working with Sunny on Monday.  That’s not to say that I didn’t spend a gazillion hours on my own over the weekend sorting and cleaning here and there on my own, but nothing like the serious business she and I do when she’s there.  Though I might try my hand at that this weekend some.

Oh and she laughed at my poor excuse of a strainer.  I admit it’s sad.  I have $1000 restaurant-quality pots and pans and really nice serving dishes and am particular about my utensils but I have this sad plastic pasta strainer.  I really want one of those metal ones that stretches across the sink, but to be honest, the sad plastic one has held up for over 10 years and doesn’t look dingy and always comes clean and shows no signs of abuse so it’s hard to think of replacing it.  So maybe I am still showing my particularness.  I mean, if it can hold up to my standards of abuse despite having been bought fairly cheap by a college student who couldn’t afford any better, then it deserves to sit amongst the restaurant-quality types and hold it’s head up high.  Heh.

Anyway, we are still not done with the kitchen, if you can believe it.  We still have the baker’s rack, which is maybe 30 minutes to an hour’s worth of work.  I may do that on my own and surprise her.

There are a couple of items that simply do not have homes at the moment.  My hand cheese/chocolate grater simply does not fit in the shallow kitchen drawers and it used to live in the drawers in my cube-cabinet, which she is making me displace.

I guess I should explain about the cube cabinet.   I bought these six modular wood cubes that’s some assortment of doored shelves, drawers, and open shelves.  There’s four little legs.  Peter and I put them together in a two wide by three high arrangement (read: I put them together and then Peter came over and re-did it right).  I originally bought it to store my Pampered Chef Stoneware in my old apartment.  The Stoneware is currently on my yet unorganized baker’s rack, which makes some sense.

Sunny (and my Mom) want it out of the kitchen, which is why Sunny worked oh-so hard to empty it.  All it has in it now are the few items that still don’t have a home and some things that need to go in the office upstairs.  I’ve talked her into letting me keep the piece of furniture and put it in the office; it will be replacing the plastic containers I currently use to sort my arts and crafts — well, the containers I bought to sort my arts and crafts that are still in boxes and such.

She and her friend Queer Eye are due over tomorrow night and she thought they might tackle the living room.   We both agree (and so does my mom) that the living room has way too much furniture, even though I got rid of one of the bookshelves already.  Sunny wants to move the baker’s rack to where the cube cabinet is and move my small cookbook bookshelf closer to the kitchen.  I guess that makes sense and it’ll block less walkway going into the kichen and make doing the laundry easier.
I told her that I’ve already sorted and purged all of the books downstairs in the living room, but that the bookshelf by the piano probably could be moved upstairs and one or two of the upstairs shelves could go and that books from upstairs needed to be purged.  The books on that downstairs shelf can go upstairs.  That would get two sets of bookshelves out of that livingroom and make it look less crowded.

I’m hoping she and her friend can help me figure out a more feng shui way to set up the furniture in there.  I hate the room set up.  It just feels…institutional.

I’m also hoping I’m not too tired when I get home tonight and get everything else I get done.  I want to frame a couple of pictures before they come over because I want her friend to help me figure out their placement.  They’re all stuff I got from Ruth last fall and just didn’t get around to hanging and should have.  (I see she’s finished Uriel now and it’s on sale.  Hmmmm… I knew I shouldn’t have looked.)

Sunny is trying to talk me out of my pantry.  It looks like this, but not so pretty.  Basically, when you walk in my house, it’s immediately to your right and when you walk down my stairs it’s at the bottom of the stairs.  I keep my food inside and my prized collection of tins on top.  She wants me to replace it with a $300 hanging shelving system that she’ll install inside my utility closet above my washer and dryer.  She said that the only part that will install into anything in the apartment will go into the ceiling and when I move in a year or so, it’ll go with me and be installable and adjustible to the new home.  She swears I’ll love it.

I don’t know.  I’m already paying her a lot of money, then there’s the cost of Pugly, plus the cost of fixing things up like new towels in the kitchen and bathroom and a new stool and lazy susans for the cabinets and a new cutting board and a nicer looking wine rack and new measuring cups and a drawer organizer plus cleaning supplies and dog toys and dog supplies and etc.  I also ordered shelves to fit on top of the washer and dryer plus something for my curling iron and blow dryer.

And I guess I’ll leave you with this…Sunny and I have begun a running “argument” about my bedroom niche.  My niche is about a chest of drawers wide and two chest of drawers deep.  Since I moved in, I have used it to replace my storage unit that I used to rent back in New Orleans.  I store my luggage and holiday decorations in there.  I hung an extra off-white curtain across it to give the illusion that there’s a wall there.  Sunny might not have noticed it on the inital tour, but the cats pulled it down the night before she arrived on the scene.

She keeps insisting that all of that stuff is going somewhere else and I keep insisting that there’s no reason to do so because what else is there to do with a niche anyway?  It’s just a niche.  It’s not big enough to do anything with but store things in.

Could be interesting once we get there.

Then again.  Maybe she’ll be too distracted by the fact that there’s enough clothes in there for every refuge from the Gulf Coast…

tags: personal organizer, Ruth Thompson

One comment

1. on April 11, 2006 at 2:52 pm

   Tamara said:

   Ooh, the Battle of the Niche! Can’t wait to see how that plays out.

   The hanging thing sounds cool, but then it’s not my $300 so I can understand your reticence.

   I’m loving these updates, thank you for sharing!

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