On Being a Saver, Part II

In my last post I confessed to saving a couple of really raw materials --- so raw, in fact, that it's difficult to imagine how exactly I might use at least one of them (metal lampshades). This time I'm revealing a couple of things I save (or collect) for their obvious utility, regardless of whether I actually capitalize on that utility (i.e., use them).

Getting Ahead on Spring Cleaning

I don't know about you, but when the cleaning bug hits me, it hits hard. My husband knows that when I get that look in my eye, he had better 1) help me or 2) get out of my way. When I casually mentioned to him over the weekend that I wanted to do some spring cleaning, he looked at me warily and asked, "Today?" "Oh, sometime this week," I said breezily. The relief on his face was palpable.

Having four people living in an 800 square foot apartment is no easy feat, especially when half the family is under the age of 3. My motto is that whenever something comes in, something needs to go out. This morning, I set out to go through the living room bookshelf to discard, rearrange, and donate a lot of the clutter. In our living room sits one of these handy IKEA monstrosities, of which 90% of New Yorkers probably own as well.

Measuring 72" x 72", this storage system packs a lot of punch. Unfortunately, it also permits for a lot of clutter. Every member of our household has at various moments stashed items behind a neat set of books, hoping that no one will notice. Usually when something is missing in our home, it's hidden in the abyss of the IKEA bookcase.

In anticipation of spring cleaning, I picked up 9 clear plastic shoebox sized bins. These boxes became my best friends as I happily placed stationary, stamps, glue, paints, stickers, and beads in their appointed, contained places. Clear plastic bins are a crafter's lifeboat.

New Yorkers need to be storage geniuses to make use of the small space we have. And crafters in NYC have an especially burdensome task. Some great stores that can help us make the most of our space are:

• The Container Store
• IKEA
• Target
• Home Depot

What's your favorite organizational system?

Karina Glaser

WindowsOfAgate.etsy.com

Adventures in Storage

I've been living in the same apartment for 12 years. In that time I've become pretty good at living with one closet, one sink, one guitar-obsessed husband, 2 cats and lots of stuff. I wouldn't say I'm a pack-rat, but I'm certainly no minimalist.



I had always assumed that our place was about 750 square feet -- I think that's what the landlord told me and I just never bothered to check. So when my husband and I started looking for a place to buy, we finally measured our apartment and found that we had actually been living in 498 square feet. Overnight things seemed almost unbearably claustrophobic!

What a great time to start my jewelry business, salt & paper, quite literally on my kitchen table! Storage became a huge issue almost immediately and so I found what seemed to be the only space left in the entire apartment and put it to work. The 9 inch gap between my pots and pans and my kitchen cupboard became my bead library. I installed a 1" x 3" plank as a long shelf. The original plan was to recycle baby food jars, but that would have required our consuming a lot of baby food (sans baby) so I finally bit the bullet and ordered cases of empty plastic jars. I organized everything by color, and filled up the shelf. I also added a magnetic strip (used to hold chef knives) to keep all my tools at hand, and making it easier to spot when my husband "borrows" some pliers to restring a guitar.



And just when I got everything organized... we found a house. Today we closed on our new house, which is just over twice the size of our current place!

-natalie
www.saltandpaper.etsy.com