Assigning a home for each object I own is important, or else putting my things away would be a constant decision-making process rather than a quick, auto-pilot procedure.
But there are good homes for my objects, and there are bad homes. I have to make sure that the items I use most frequently are getting homed in prime real estate.
What’s the prime real estate within my home? The most visible, accessible, convenient storage places.
I have a mug of coffee each morning (or else), and I occasionally serve wine at gatherings in my home. Now, I could store all my glasses, mugs, and cups in one cabinet with three shelves. Sounds “organized,” right? Sure, but it’s not optimized.
The things I use everyday should be very, very easy to retrieve and to return. So, my mugs are on hooks, directly above the dishwasher. (On hooks are one of only two types of “on” I’ll allow for storage, because “IN” something beats “ON something.)
The wine glasses used once in a while are located across the kitchen from the dishwasher, on a high shelf that’s a tad inconvenient for my 5 foot frame to reach. I even store wine bottles in a rack on top of my cabinets, which I can’t reach at all without standing on a chair. But that minor inconvenience is tolerable, because I don’t drink wine every single day. (Come to think of it, I should put all potential vices on top of my cabinets…)
If I had to stand on a chair to reach my percolator and mugs every morning, I would accumulate a lot of frustration.
This concept of prime real estate is the most helpful in the places we have to access every single day, namely our closets, our bathrooms, and our kitchens. I don’t store my formal clothes in the prime real estate of the bedroom closet, because my everyday wardrobe is more deserving. The cocktail dresses live in a hall closet. I don’t store dozens of back up toilet paper rolls in the prime real estate of the bathroom, because my toiletries are more deserving. The back-up TP lives in the basement. I don’t store my appliance manuals in the prime real estate of my kitchen drawers, because my cooking utensils deserve that space. The manuals get stashed in the “House” folder in my file box. (Or they get recycled, because the internet exists.)
This is yet another way I commit home organizer sacrilege and stash the pair of shoes I currently have in use near the door. I will wear them tomorrow, and the day after that, until the weather changes or the activity I have planned for the day changes. So they deserve that primest of real estate.