Situation:

An incredibly large pantry with built-in shelves and drawers but a very industrious and busy cook. It seemed to have a life of it’s own and created it’s own systems if we didn’t keep an eye open for small hands and hungry mouths!

Challenge:

There were so many shelves and drawers that it looked deceptively easy to organize. This is a common situation with too much space in pantries, closets or other areas in your home. Because of the expanse of storage space, you keep buying more and more products to fill it up. Sound familiar? This actually wasn’t the issue in this pantry but a good thing to keep in mind if you have a large but out-of-control storage area.

Solutions:

We decided what zones were really necessary to keep everything organized in this space. Zones were super important since this was a very busy mom with a multi-cultural family with a variety of palettes.

Specific zones were created to include:

1. Condiments, Sauces

2. Asian Cuisine

3. Canned Goods: Soups, Veggies

4. Canned Goods: Mexican

5. Baking / Entertaining Zone

6. Rice/Pastas

7. Teas / Beverages

8. Snack Zone

9. Breakfast Zone

These are the zones created specifically for foods. After that we created storage for appliances and other items to include:

1. Entertaining  2. Baking  3. Cooking  4. Paper Goods

Click here to see more specific solutions for storage and zone organizing for pantries. I use these solutions frequently when I work in with clients and you might end up with some new ideas for your own pantry!

PS Please post any good solutions you have developed on your own in the comment form below so that others can benefit from your clever tips and tricks!

Situation: This laundry room also served as a craft room. The previous owner had designed a built-in work space with cabinets but there were too many items to fit inside the area until they were better organized.

Challenge: There were multiple crafts projects Read the rest of this entry »

Situation: A very productive and active office with too many books and papers and not enough cabinets, file drawers  or shelves.

Challenge: No system was in place for all of the papers to land when they arrived into the home office. Also there was no specific place for them to Read the rest of this entry »

Many of my clients are stuck in the muck of their scrap booking projects. Scrapbook inertia is a common phenomenon. It often comes from wanting to make your pages perfect or simply not knowing where to begin.

Perhaps you can’t figure out how to Read the rest of this entry »

Situation: This garage had plenty of built-in storage but a mess was created when we decided to get rid of the off-site storage unit and consolidate everything into the garage. As with most organizing projects, there is usually temporary chaos before there is order.

Challenge: The back wall of this garage had built-in floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall shelves but they were completely full of childhood memories consisting of one large plastic bin per child per year.With three kids all of them at least in middle school, that meant a lot of bins!

Solution: We went through all of the kid’s  memory boxes. At first it was very hard for my client to get rid of childhood papers. She eventually became a champ at making decisions and letting go of enough memories so that each child’s memory items could fit into only one to two bins each. This reduced the storage bins from about 6-8 per child to 2 which gave us a lot more space to store items brought from the off-site storage unit. My client did an amazing job learning how to let go. Her kids still have plenty of great memorabilia to discover and uncover later!