Tag: Clutter

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10 Tips for Creating a Small Apartment You’ll Love to Live In

Today’s guest post is from Karen Krizanovich, a small-space dweller living in London. She recently shared her experience and philosophy in the The Times UK. Today, she gives pointers for how to create a no-fuss, reasonably-priced small apartment (aka apartment) you’ll love to live in. 

Yes, I would love to live in the Hong Kong apartment designed by Gary Chang, the architect who transformed 344 sq ft into 24 different living spaces. Unfortunately, my flat doesn’t have that kind of scope and neither do I. Still, I can adopt similar principles learned from my friend architect Professor Miriam Neet, LifeEdited and other resources to live in a streamlined, no-fuss, no-muss and non-neurotic fashion. I’ve found the following tips to be indispensable for making a small home you truly want to live in.

  1. Live in your place a few months before making complicated or permanent non-essential changes. Think you know everything already how you live–what’s important, what’s not? You’ll be wrong at least 25% of the time. Be patient. You won’t regret it.
  2. Be a simpleton. We all love innovative, automated designs. But what happens when they break? Who’ll fix it? What if the electricity goes off? What about the batteries? As much as I’d love to own, say, electric curtain rails, I know I’m asking for trouble. Remember that guy with the cool thing that didn’t work? Don’t be him.
  3. Follow your gut. I never liked the way my kitchen cupboard doors shut (stupid spring devices). I said I’d give them a try but, deep in my soul, I knew they’d irk me. And they still do. Little annoying things like this are accentuated in a small space and erode the comfort of your home. Fix things immediately that don’t feel right.
  4. With things you love, buy to last. Plan to repair them when needed. Like a great pair of shoes, your home should be serviceable, look great and fit perfectly.
  5. When the space is small, bad design really grates. Everything has to be just right. Settling for ugly solutions will do temporarily, but always keep on the lookout for the right one.
  6. Buy a cheaper version to roadtest. I’ve bought five different chairs and none of them really worked in the space. Now I’m testing an inexpensive version of another design. If it works, I’ll buy the expensive one eventually.
  7. Ask yourself what you really need. I don’t need a coffee grinder. I barely need a blender and I sure as heck don’t need a blender that is also a soup maker. Keep gadgetry to a basic level–and keep them off the kitchen counter. Clutter is your small flat’s supreme enemy.
  8. Make your home user-friendly. Like training a horse, you don’t want someone to get on and have to learn new techniques. You want anyone to be able to ride your horse right away. Same with your apartment. Keep things basic and obvious. I don’t care for murphy beds or complicated heating systems. Toilets should flush, not do tricks. You don’t want a flat that makes you or other occupants feel stupid.
  9. Love your neighbourhood. One of the big advantages of living in a small flat is that you can afford to live in a neighbourhood that would otherwise be out of reach. Know why you’re there and what’s great about it. That way, even if your apartment transformation is taking a long long time, you’ll remember the bigger picture.
  10. Decide a good want. When you’re considering buying something, imagine your day-to-day life with it. If something really makes you happy–if it is a delight to use, to look at, to own, then it’s probably worth it. If you can live without it, try to do that.
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Tip of the Day: Lose the Shoes When You Roost

Here’s an exercise: Take some dog feces, antifreeze, herbicides, gasoline, motor oil and most any other common toxic substance you can think of, mix it all together, then rub it all over your home’s floors. While this might sound a bit dramatic, it’s exactly what happens when we wear our shoes in our homes.

The outside world, while filled with great people and opportunities, is a cesspool. And our shoes are the main point of contact with this wondrous cesspool, so it only makes sense that when we get home, we should take our shoes off.

Few single actions are as effective at keeping our homes sanitary as well as dirt, dust and stain free as taking shoes off every time we enter our home. It also has the benefit of preserving the finish of our floors.

Many countries, particularly in Asia, seem to get this. Most every Japanese home includes something called a Genkan (pictured above), which is an area by the front door where you keep your shoes. It is recessed so dirt and debris is quarantined to this front area.

So you know all of this, but you still don’t do it. Here are a few tips to lose the shoes forever:

  • Don’t make exceptions. This is the most important tip in maintaining a shoe-free home. Even if you’re popping in for a second, even if it’s your rambunctious nephew or new friend, get your shoes off.
  • Put a sign at the door asking guests to take their shoes off. Sometimes asking others is the hardest part of maintaining this rule. A sign lets people know the policy is universal, not personal. Put it in a few different languages if you have a lot of foreigner guests.
  • Have a place to remove your shoes such as a bench. Make it easy for people to get their shoes off.
  • Have a place to store shoes such as a rack or cubby holes. 
  • Keep slippers or some other type of footwear used only indoors. They’ll keep you feet warm, and protect your floors from bare feet, which often are dirtier than socks or slippers [Note: make a no-exception policy about slippers as well–they are only for indoors. No runs to the mailbox, etc.]. While slippers for guests might not be feasible, a few pair of nice, clean socks are.

What are your experiences or tips with keeping (or not) a shoe-free home? Let us know in our comments section.

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Clear Up Clutter with Magic Magnetic Wall

This magnetic wall from Austrian company Magic Wall falls in the category of “why-didn’t they think of this sooner.” The company sells various sized panels with embedded magnets, strong enough to hold your pots, pans, knives, tools or any other ferrous object.

The panels are available in a laminate, wood and Terrazzo stone surfaces. They also offer shelves and other “Magic Tools” that affix to the wall surface. Watch their video above to see the wall in action.

At €269-€1079/$350-$1400 per panel, they’re not cheap. The company indicated that they will ship to the the US. While pricey, they’re extremely versatile, and because you can stick virtually any metal object on them, they will never lose their usefulness.

Via PSFK

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Make it Pretty or Make it Disappear: 5 Tips for Tiny Living

We ran across this video from Daily Beast interviewing couple James Casey and Erin Boyle in their 240 sq ft Brooklyn Heights, New York apartment.

Even by Hong Kong standards, 240 sq ft–or 120 per person–is pretty damn small. Fittingly, the couple gave some advice for making the tiny space manageable.

  1. Creative storage. They use existing and nice objects for storage.
  2. Minimize waste. They minimize what comes in and out of the apartment.
  3. Go mini. Household supplies like their trash can and broom are on the small size.
  4. De-clutter. Even in a 240 sq ft space, the couple had a miscellaneous bin, but that bin was kept in a nice old wine box kept underneath their couch.
  5. Adaptability. They pointed to a couple Peshtemal Turkish towels that dry quickly (important when there are only two out at a time) and are pretty enough to be displayed.

Summed up, I’d say their advice is don’t have a lot of stuff and what stuff you do have make it nice, pretty or able to get out of sight.

The best part of the video is the practical demonstration that living an edited life requires no special equipment (there is not one piece of transforming furniture) or enormous budget.

Do you live in a tiny space? What advice would you add?

Via Daily Beast

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Go High with DIY Storage System

Even if you’ve pared down your stuff considerably, it doesn’t mean you are stuff-free. You still need that abacus for tax-season or that cricket set for your anglophilic outings. In other words, most of us–save Andrew Hyde–need storage.

A lot of storage takes up valuable floor or wall real estate–a particular waste for stuff you don’t need to access all that often. Ideally, stuff you don’t need that often doesn’t occupy proverbial beachfront property.

We ran across this simple ceiling-mounted storage scheme from The Family Handyman that uses seldom-used vertical space, perfect for seldom-used items.

The site provides a step-by-step guide for constructing the system. The skill level required to make and install it is higher than something like an Elfa system, but it’s surely less expensive for comparably volume (~$100-500). And it’s more versatile; though they use big red bins, we could imagine affixing flanges to the rim of any box for easy sliding; this way you could make the system aesthetically suitable for any room.

Do you have creative storage solutions that use seldom-used spaces? Let us know.

via The Family Handyman

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Make Your Kitchen Flow Like a Faucet

Part of living an edited life is making choices in your home that make sense–putting stuff in its right place near where it can be accessed and is used. Few places is this more true than in the kitchen, and especially true in small kitchens. Justin Klosky from OCD Experience gives practical tips on how you can optimize kitchen logic and organization. 

Kitchen Flow…Yo Yo Yo

Like a good song, there needs to be flow and rhythm, which can also be applied to the way you organize your kitchen. When organizing your kitchen think of it in terms of efficiency first then organization. Dishes should be stored in cabinets near the dish washer while pots and pans should be close to the stove. The more efficient your kitchen is setup the more effective you will be when cooking in it. Like the garage the kitchen can become very overwhelming if you don’t grab hold of it, so we gravitate towards organizational products that you can see through which will make things look and feel cleaner. Items like these Square Pop Canisters are great for organizing and storing cereals, pastas and nosh foods. You should also take the time to label these canisters which will make the first glance your last glance. For smaller items that can get out of control we suggest investing into these tea bags storage containers to eliminate the tea boxes and the possibility of tea bags ending up everywhere. Akro bins are your best bet for canned goods, and almost anything else you want to bring order to as they come in all sizes. It also brings clarity into your kitchen when you can see everything you are looking for.

Kitchen Flow Tip: The most important tip when organizing your kitchen is flow. The more you can flow in your kitchen the more fun you will have in it and the more love you will be able to bring to your food. The most used items should be a few steps or arm’s length away.

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Is Swapping the New Shopping?

Part of the allure of shopping and getting new stuff is novelty. Humans like new things–it’s probably a neurochemical. The problem is that new stuff has consequences, some of which we elucidated yesterday.

A site called Swap.com gives a way of satisfying your new stuff jones without maxing out your credit, storage space or ailing planet’s resources.

As the name suggests, the site allows people to swap their stuff. The site has tons of useful items like cell phones, clothes and media. It’s a little like eBay insofar as people make offers on the swap–you wouldn’t trade your car for a cell phone after all. When a swap is agreed upon, the two parties work out the details like shipping and so forth. Swap.com does not take a cut (we’re not sure how they make money actually).

Security is a little dicey. There are user profiles, but the site’s security page suggests that buyer and seller beware to avoid “swap-lifting.” Like eBay, it’s a matter of establishing a good reputation and there are many users who do multiple swaps. They also suggest doing as much as you can locally, which is feasible for people living in places like NYC or SF.

There’s a subset of the swap economy that focuses exclusively on women’s clothes. Sites include Swapaholics, Clothing Swap and Swapstyle. The former two focus on live events and the latter facilitates online swapping.

Some might contend that this type of swapping is a watered-down version of pathological consumerism (a point made quite clear in Nightline feature above). This may be true to some extent, though the consequences of swapping are much fewer than buying new stuff. Just as important is habituating people to find other ways of getting the things we need.

Do you have experience swapping–either with these sites or informally? If so, we would love to hear your tips and experience.

image credit: postconsumers.com

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Cut Paper Clutter and Future-Proof Documents

A thoughtful handwritten card is great, but most paper we deal with is just annoying, clogging filing drawers and neural pathways alike. Justin Klosky from OCD Experience gives tips how you can convert your paper clutter and create digital organization that will allow you to access documents for many years to come. 

Reduce Paper/Utilize Technology

If you have more than one filing drawer in your home and small business this applies to you!

It is time to O.C.D. (Organize & Create Discipline) and rid yourself of papers in your entire life. To prevent this tip from becoming pages of instructions, simply start going digital today. We won’t discuss the prior work you need to do, so if you don’t already have one, buy a scanner, an external hard drive and a paper shredder. It will be worth every penny.

Simply start scanning ANYTHING that you truly think you will need to reference again and shred the originals. Create a simple folder structure on your computer like you would a filing cabinet and utilize additional folders for each category you will be scanning documents for. Common folders will be: Business, Children, Health, Home, Insurance, Money/Taxes, Receipts, Resumes.

Lastly setup your external hard drive to back up your computer anytime a file has been altered and added. This will also prevent you from losing your data.

Organize: Gather all of your paper documents you want to take the time to digitize.

Create: Create a simple folder structure to store all of your digital files.

Discipline: Whenever a document comes in that needs to be scanned and filed make sure you do it daily, if not weekly. Never let something sit longer than a week or it will eventually become a chore!

Reduce Paper/Utilize Technology Tip: Only scan what you truly need in your life and shred the rest. This will eliminate paper pile ups and will allow you to live in a paperless world as effectively as possible. Keep all hard copies of certified documents.

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Get Rid of Dead Spots and Duplicates in Your Music Library

We tend to focus a lot on durable good clutter, but increasingly digital clutter is the nuisance du jour. While you might not need to get a storage unit to house it, it’s still a pain. It hogs RAM slowing down our computers, it makes us get external hardrives or increase our cloud backup for files we don’t need and most importantly, it makes finding files we do need exceedingly difficult.

One of the primary repositories of digital clutter is the music collection. Perhaps you imported a library from somewhere (in a highly legal manner) or you—heaven forbid—pressed “Add File to Library” more than once on iTunes. Suddenly, you have 5 files for “Sympathy for the Devil”—one listed under “Rolling Stones,” another under “The Rolling Stones” and a few as tracks 4, 6 and 11.

A service called TuneUp takes care of this issue, zapping duplicates as well as cleaning up your music library in other ways.

Tuneup offers a few services available bundled or à la carte:

  • Clean your library by fixing mislabeled or missing song information (like “Track 01” or “Unknown Artist”) using waveform recognition.
  • Scan your entire music collection and fill in missing album artwork.
  • Find and remove duplicate music files from your music library using waveform recognition.

The full suite is available for $40 annually/$50 lifetime (includes one computer transfer). All services are available à la carte for $20 annually/$30 yearly. Tuneup is available for Macs and PC’s and works with both iTunes and Windows Media Player.

While this might strike some as steep, consider that digital media is an asset you might keep for a while. And just as you might have bought a CD-rack once upon a time, spending a few bucks to organize your MP3’s might be a worthwhile investment.

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Don’t Let Your Garage Become a Dumping Ground

While you might be striving for a more edited life, chances are you still live in a conventional home. And in most conventional homes, a major repository for clutter is the garage–it becomes a catchall for the stuff we don’t use or want to see. Today, Justin Klosky from OCD Experience gives great tips for making sure your garage doesn’t become your own private junkyard.

Most people use their garage as a large storage space with no thought of organization. Think of your garage as a home away from home. Like your home you want to know where everything is and make use of the things in it. The primary use of your garage should be for your automobiles. If you have the luxury of using your garage for other things as well make sure that you utilize the empty wall space first.

Organize: PULL EVERYTHING OUT OF YOUR GARAGE! I know it might seem overwhelming, but you need to know what you are organizing before you start putting things where you think they go.

Create: Invest in custom cabinets or industrial shelving where you can store seasonal items such as Halloween or Christmas decorations. For you Christmas lovers look into the ornament storage container! Always make sure that whatever you are putting into your garage is safe from moisture and rodents. Always store items in airtight bins to prevent damage. If you have an excessive amount of tools you can use peg boards like these. These peg boards keep tools organized and out of the reach of little children. Make sure paint and hazardous items are locked away from children. O.C.D. approved accessories are lockers for children’s toys which will allow you to teach them where their items belong and will also keep things neat. Some fun organization tools for the adult kid in us are sport organizers such as this golf organizer and the Electric Lift System to keep larger, bulkier items off the floor . If you are storing food or cans in your garage make sure the food isn’t near the chemicals as food and chemicals don’t mix.

 Discipline: Make sure you don’t just pile things back into your garage. If you are storing something in your garage it better be for a good reason.

Garage Organization Tip: The garage can end up as a dumping ground if strict organizational discipline isn’t implemented. Make sure that if you are putting anything in your garage, it has a place, it is easily accessible and you never have to wonder what is hiding in your garage.

image credit: OCD Experience

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