004 - The Lisa Glossary Part 4: Renaming Everyday Home Spaces for Modern Life

Thanks for listening to this special playlist of the Organized 365 Podcast. The Organized 365 Podcast started in 2014. With over 500 episodes and 15 million downloads, we know there is a lot of content to sift through. This taste of the Organized 365 Podcast is just a taste of what you can find in the full podcast and is easy to share with your family and friends who want to join you on your quest to learn the skill of organizing and grow your mindset of what is possible as you move into a proactive and purposeful life. Enjoy this podcast curation of the Organized 365 Podcast that will take you through all the big ideas we have uncovered in the last 7+ years of podcasting. Along the way, I, Lisa Woodruff, have created a whole new glossary of terms for us to use to define and understand the invisible work and belief systems we have from our childhoods and how and why homes function the way they do. Happy New Year. Oh my goodness. The number one question I get from people who listen to the podcast is, how do I introduce a new person to Organize 365? Lisa Woodruff says, So many things, like where would you even start? So 18 months ago, I recorded 8 podcasts that were called the Lisa Glossary. Basically all these words that I just kind of made up and have turned into what Organized 365 is today. And guess what? This week we are turning 10 years old. Oh my goodness. Organized 365 is 10 years old. And for the first 8 days of January, I am going to re-air these glossary podcasts. That we recorded in the summer of 2020 that will tell you how Organized 365 got to be what it is today and our philosophy, our outlook, our methodology on organization. And in the 18 months since we recorded these podcasts, there have been a lot more terms and things that I have created. So for the rest of January on the Fridays, the last 3 Fridays in January, I will be recording a new glossary podcast 9, 10, and 11. We'll be talking about the Paper Solution, the binders, and the research that Organized 365 is doing now. So sit back and listen and get motivated to take back your house this year and finally get organized.

This week's mailbag comes to us from a Facebook follower. Ladies, I have an Organized 365 win. My aunt has been in the hospital for 4 weeks in Florida. My mom has been there the whole time. Yesterday they moved my aunt to hospice due to her condition not improving. Because of school closing and college classes being canceled, the hubs and kids are all out of school for a few weeks, so we decided to drive down and see my aunt for one last time. I have implemented systems in the home and reduced clutter to the point where when we made the decision to drive down last night at 11 PM, I have been able to pack 6 people, close up the house for 12 days, load the van, and we will pull out tomorrow morning at 5 AM. I have the binder sheets in my Productive Padfolio and I am working on those during the drive down. I am less stressed, considering, able to focus, and looking forward to visiting with my aunt and taking the kids to the beach. It's amazing what less clutter and systems will do for you. Do you have an Organize365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an email at customerservice@organize365.com and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, and your life with Organize365.

Welcome to the Organize365 podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff. This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you, so let's get started. Do you remember your favorite teacher and your favorite class growing up in school? I'm sure there are a lot of qualities that that teacher had, but you just were hungry for the knowledge that was in that class. You did better, you tried harder, you showed up early, you stayed later. You loved learning from this specific teacher. Here at Organized 365, we are an education company. I'm a teacher by trade, and I want to teach you to love and be really great at the skill of organizing and increased productivity. And along the way, as your teacher, I've created my own systems, methodologies, and a lot of terms. I mean, a lot of terms. There are a lot of things that I say that nobody else says. And you're like, what is a golden window? What is functional organizing? These are the things that I'm going to unpack for you in the next 8 episodes. Now, don't worry, it isn't going to be just a list of vocabulary with definitions. I have organized the next 8 episodes in order so that you kind of go from how Organize 365 started and has grown over the last 8 years and how you find organizing and learn and grow and get organized as well. So sit back, relax, and let's get started organizing. Here in part 4 of the Organize 365 story, we are going to talk about renaming the everyday home spaces in your house for modern life. Many times in the Organized 365 podcast, I will say that your house was probably designed by a middle-aged white guy in the '50s. And I came to this realization, you know why? From The Brady Bunch. Do you know on The Brady Bunch, he was an architect? And I was trying to explain on a podcast how we should have the freedom to rename our houses. And I was like, you know, so often I talk about how our thoughts about how we should be as homeowners, as men and women, as parents, comes from what we saw on TV. And what I saw on TV growing up was The Brady Bunch. That is the show that I watched every single episode of. I also watched The Cosby Show and other ones, but The Brady Bunch is the one that I watched when I was in grade school. And the reason why I think that that one had such an impact on me is because I was watching how a home flowed. Now ironically, during this time, my mom was an entrepreneur and had a business in the basement, but because I was watching every day The Brady Bunch, I thought that families acted like The Brady Bunch. Isn't that so weird? Like, even the house that we grew up in did not have as big of a picture for me as the pictures I saw on TV. So when I look at the Brady Bunch specifically, and when I really started deep diving into this in preparation for teaching the Embrace conference, I was thinking about how much the media impacted my housekeeping and my parenting, and that's when I made this stunning realization, you guys. Did you watch— I'm 48. So did you watch The Brady Bunch growing up? Did you like The Brady Bunch? Here's the revelation that I made. Alice was not the mom. Alice was the live-in housekeeper. I don't even think she was live-in. She showed up every day in her car. Carol was the mom. But my recollection of watching that show, and I watched all of the episodes, it's been a while, but I watched all the episodes. I don't remember seeing Carol very much. But I really remember Alice and I loved Alice and I wanted to be Alice. I mean, Alice went to the grocery store and Alice did all of the cooking and Alice was the one that the kids would come in and talk to. And Alice was there whenever the dog did whatever the dog did. And as I was getting ready for the Embrace conference and, oh, I'm going to talk about The Brady Bunch, I was like, oh my gosh, I modeled my entire adult life after a housekeeper. I still don't even know what Carol Brady did. Was she working? What was she doing? Why wasn't she doing any of those things? I don't— like, it boggles my mind that somehow watching that TV show every single day for years and years and years and years made me model my life after a housekeeper. And I'm not saying there's anything negative about being a housekeeper. I'm saying that there was a mom in the picture, and what did she do other than be in bed with the husband at night and talking? I remember Carol Brady in very many of those episodes at all. And often when something happened to the kids, Alice was there and then Carol would show up. I could be wrong, it's not like I've gone back and watched it again, but this is how I remember it in my head. So I was explaining in one of my podcast episodes where I talked to myself— this is kind of weird, you guys. So obviously pandemic, husband's working at home. I said, oh yeah, this is a talking day, this is the day when I go talk to myself on podcasts but people listen later. And I was like, wow, that sounds really unusual when I say it out loud. I was trying to explain how we should think about our houses differently, how our houses function differently today. And again, because I watched so much Brady Bunch, apparently all I could think of was that living room in The Brady Bunch with, um, Mr. Brady coming out with his architecture drawings. I was like, oh, that's right, he's an architect. And I watched that show in the '70s. But then I thought about our American houses, and American houses were built during the baby boom. And before the baby boom, we didn't have these 2,500 square feet houses, which is the average American house. People lived in apartments, they lived with other family members, they lived in little tiny row houses. These American suburban homes came from the baby boom. And I was thinking, baby boom, baby boomer, Brady Bunch. Mr. Brady, he's an architect. I was like, oh my gosh, there have not been very many changes to how we build households than the ones that were created for baby boomers that were moving out into the suburbs, right? I mean, think about it. And who were the architects at that time? Middle-aged white guys. So men, first of all, men who left the house and went to work developed the house that mostly women and children live in nonstop for a couple of decades before the women would get out and work again. I'm not making a political statement. I'm not a non-feminist or anything. I'm just quoting history. When these houses were made, they were designed by men for women who predominantly stayed home and raised their children in them, and the children functioned in them. And at that time, there were family dinners, so there was dining rooms and there were kitchens. There was living rooms where people, you know, the men would come home from work. Again, now I'm thinking Leave It to Beaver. They'd come home from work and they would sit in their chair and they would have their paper and they would relax with the family before they went in to have the family meal. And the kids would be in their bedrooms or the kids would be outside playing. I only know this because this is what I saw on TV. This isn't actually what happened in my house. This is what I saw on TV, so this is what I imagine happened in every other American house, which I'm pretty sure is not what happened in any American house, but it is what we saw on TV. So when I was a child, how I actually used our house— we lived out in the country, and it was a suburban-type country, but there were no sidewalks. There were 72 houses on our street with only 2 other houses that had kids in them, which were both boys. Ask how I know this. One, because I've always been a researcher, and two, because I started a newsletter, and in order to start a family newsletter, I had to count how many houses there were on my bike ride so I could mimeograph the correct number of newsletters to give out. Now, you should know, this is the newsletter that had the worst grammar and horrible spelling, but boy, did I have fun making it. And I did it on a copier. I also was the self-appropriated person who coordinated our neighborhood block party and I would send block party invitations to all 72 houses in which we would have tractor competitions. Everybody had like their riding lawn mowers, and everybody would ride their riding lawn mowers to the top cul-de-sac where we had the party that I just told you about, the block party that we had. And then the dads would get on the tractors and they would do a tractor race. Country. Not really country, quasi-country. So Being the older sister to Emily, who you have met on the podcast, 4 years older, 2 other families that had children in our neighborhood, both boys, not a lot of people to play with, right? Like, we could ride our bikes, and this is like the late '70s. It wasn't like we— when I was 16, we went to the mall, but like, when you were a kid, you didn't go to the mall. We didn't go anywhere. We played. We went outside and we played, but it wasn't like we played with other people because there were no other people to play with. Luckily, I have a great imagination, so I created this thing called Big Friend. And Big Friend was how I turned our house into a microcosm of the world. And Emily and I, our bedrooms, I called our apartments. And I called our kitchen the restaurant. And then I made a map of our driveway. We had a really long driveway, and then there was the main road, and then we had trees, we had about an acre and a half of property. And so I drew like where we would ride our bikes through the grass, I created those as little side roads and I had them labeled based on the main roads inside of our town. And so we would make directions like go up to Timberline, then go down to this street, then you need to go over to Montrose, and like I would give her directions and she would have to go leave her apartment and go get on her bike and ride your bike a certain way through our yard on these pretend roads and then come back in the same front door that you just went out, and now you were at the Bake Shop, because that was the name of the restaurant that we liked, and that's where we would meet for lunch. So we would leave our mini apartments, we would get on our bikes, we would ride around our yard, come back in from the front door, and we'd come into the kitchen and be like, hey, you want to meet at the Bake Shop? All right. And then we would call each other on pretend phones. And my mom was running a, uh, her own business out of the basement. Like, she had her own business she started from scratch So she was working in the basement, this is what we were doing upstairs. So I created these spatial areas in my mind as a kid to entertain myself and my sister. I also was a babysitter. It is the only profession I've had other than professional organizer and teacher, and I was the funnest babysitter ever. So I would go over to babysitters' houses, and, um, one of the jobs I had, I babysat a family where the kids were separated in age, I think by like 8 years. So the baby was like well, was a baby when I started, and then the other child was my sister's age, so just 4 years younger than me. So I started babysitting when I was 12, so yeah, she was 8 and then the baby was a baby. So as I babysat this family for a couple of years, it is challenging to keep an 8-year-old engaged who especially is wicked smart and likes to have a lot of attention and take care of a baby at the same time. So I would create hide and go seek. And we played hide and go seek in their house on all 3 floors. But I had to make it easy enough for the baby when he was like 2 and hard enough for the then 9-year-old so that she wanted to play. And so we did it in 2 ways. She had to search the whole house, but then when it was the baby's turn, you know, the 2-year-old's turn to find us, if I had been hiding in a room and I moved— so when I was hiding, hide and go seek, you could have gone in that room and then you went back out and then I would move when you weren't looking and I would go back in that room. So I would put a stuffed animal in front of the doorway if I had already hidden in that room and I was no longer hiding in that room anymore. This is the kind of brain I have, you guys. If you're on— yeah, I could sit here and record podcasts for myself all day long. I tell you this because we are imaginative and we are creative people and we use our houses in so, so, so many ways. And now today, even before the global pandemic, a lot of us were working at home. And going forward, I would say for the next couple of years, we're probably going to continue to evolve how we use our homes now that we know they are our safe space. And a lot of people who started working from home will continue to work from home. I have worked from home for the last 20 years. I've never not worked from home except for 18 months when I was a teacher after my children were born. I have never had a home office until last year when I took over my daughter's bedroom. So I have always worked from home, and we do not have a home office in this house. So I have worked in a loft, I have worked in my bedroom for years, I worked in a corner of the family room when the kids were little. Like, I have worked all over this house, and I want you to really think about your house as different spaces. One of the reasons why completely emptying a drawer or completely emptying a cabinet or completely emptying your closet before you put things back in works so well in helping you declutter and get organized is this: when you try to look inside of a drawer and figure out what to get rid of, you'll pick a couple of things out you should get rid of and you might straighten up the drawer, but the physical act of taking absolutely everything out of that drawer and putting it on the kitchen counter wiping out that drawer and then physically going to put those things in, you see the same exact items that were in the drawer a minute ago differently when they're on top of your kitchen counter because now all of a sudden they're not in their home anymore. And when they're not in their home anymore, you start to go, "Do I really need that? I didn't realize I had 3 of those. Why? Oh, this one's actually broken. I didn't realize it was broken in the drawer, but it's definitely broken. We need to get rid of it." So you notice that when you get in your drawer. This is why the Sunday basket, back to last week's episode, works so well. You put all your ideas in the Sunday basket, then on Sunday you sort them into the slash pockets. And then if you fit, if you do it how you're supposed to, and every single slash pocket comes out of your Sunday basket and your Sunday basket is empty, and you pick them up one at a time asking yourself the question, can this wait until next Sunday? Can this wait until next Sunday? Can this wait until next Sunday? I promise you do it where you just move the, the slash pockets with your fingers but don't take them out of the Sunday basket and ask yourself that question, and then take them all the way out and ask yourself that question. You will see things differently in those slash pockets when you're holding it in your hand than you do when you're just touching it as you're going through the Sunday basket. There is something different about it, and that is what is important about this podcast episode specifically. The name that you give to the rooms in your house changes the way you view how that space is used and the things that you keep in that space. So the first one that is definitely not something I've ever heard anybody else talk about and something that I created 40 years ago is the fact that your child's bedrooms are not bedrooms. They are mini apartments. And I love the idea about your child's bedroom being a mini apartment for multiple reasons. First of all, when you tell your child that their bedroom is their mini apartment, it immediately gives them ownership over it, and they're like, "That's right, this is my space." Secondly, you then become the landlord. Now, you're allowed to have strict landlord rules or lenient landlord rules. Mine are fairly lenient, but I have always loved my bedroom. I've always love doing things in my bedroom, and I have always seen my children's bedrooms as their own mini entity for themselves. And so my kids' bedrooms were designed for them when they were babies, and I completely redecorated my kids' bedrooms 5 times between the time when they were born until the time when they left their bedrooms at the age of 18. I would repaint, re-wallpaper. We did not recarpet. We recarpeted only once. We rarely bought new furniture. It was mostly aesthetic. It was mostly paint, and we moved from teddy bears to pink butterflies. And for Joey, his bedroom was Bengals orange for a while. Wow, was that hard to cover over when we were done with that. Uh, I painted Joey's wall camouflage, like hand camouflage his wall for a period of time. Abby had a silver ceiling at one point, you know, with just silver paint. She also had hand hand-stenciled clouds that a neighbor who used to live near us is an artist, a famous artist, and she came over and she made clouds on Abby's ceiling that have now been painted over. But as my kids, about every 3 to 4 years in the summer, we would completely move everything into the middle of their room, repaint the ceilings, the walls. Why did I care? We took the door off of the closet so it was easier to access the closet. We, we painted inside the closet. It did not cost a lot of money It costs time, but their, their bedrooms were always a reflection on them and where they were in their phase of life and the things that they really loved. And I wanted them to love their bedrooms. Also, I allowed them to have toys in the rooms, and they had mini refrigerators, and they had TVs, and, you know, whatever was their passion project, because I do see it as their mini apartment. And here's something that is unusual to me, although I think it should be adopted. I wanted to be the stay-at-home mom that homeschooled her kids and had 4 kids and they had jurisdictions and they all had jobs. And because I'm obsessed with large families as well. But along the way, my children, um, struggled keeping their own bedrooms clean and organized. And what I realized over time was that having ownership over your bedroom, which I call an apartment, both for aesthetically how it's going to look and match your phase of life, also is the right amount of responsibility for taking care of a space. So they were responsible for cleaning their bedroom, and if they cleaned their bedroom, I would vacuum it when they were younger. And as they got older, they had to do all of those pieces and parts. And so they're responsible for dusting and vacuuming and Windexing and cleaning and organizing and decluttering. And I, of course, will come in and help with that but it is their space. And now that Joey's moved off into a true apartment, he is able to maintain that apartment space. My kids do not have their organization and homemaking abilities honed to the point where they can maintain this entire house. It's my job. I own the house. I'm the landlord. They are responsible for their apartment. So I love this idea of apartments. Now recently, I still love my bedroom. I do a lot of things in my bedroom. I do have a TV. I watch I read books in there, I do puzzles in there, I do my Sunday mask in there. Ours has a bathroom attached to it, so I take a nightly hot bath. I love my bedroom. And one of the things I realized as our kids became teenagers was they definitely embraced the idea that their bedroom was their apartment and that they had jurisdiction over that and they could make decisions in there based on if the landlord said yes or no. And I was like, well, that's nice. I wish I had a space like that. And then I realized I did. I have my own bedroom. However, I have a condo, so the master bedroom suite is called your condo. And so you're— you have a little bit more freedom in there. You obviously don't have to talk to a landlord because you own it. Because it's a condo, it's a little bit bigger. It has a few different rules than apartment would have. So we have kids' apartments and parents' condos. This is such a proactive way of giving your kids and yourself the permission to have a space that is just for you. Who cares if Abby has got a silver ceiling and purple walls and Joey has camouflage bedroom and I have, you know, navy blue and a traditional bedroom? It does not matter if our bedrooms aren't all the same unless you're putting your house on the market. Very few people go into your bedroom area of your house anyway. It doesn't have to match the decor of the rest of the house. So we can have some freedom in that. Now, when you go in the rest of your house, I give you the permission, #permissiongranted, to change the names of other spaces. Along the way in virtual organizing, professional organizing, and questions that you have asked me, I have told many people to create a library, put, bookshelves all the way down the wall if you want. Create a library, create a Lego room, create a craft room, create a home office in your living room. Your living room can become a home office. Just because there's not a wall and a door there doesn't mean it isn't a home office. Wherever you're working, newsflash, that is your office. If you have a dining room, it doesn't have to be a dining room. It can be your family room and dining— or your living room and dining room area can become a great room that is all living room. You see what I'm saying? Or you can get rid of your eat-in kitchen and make that like a, a school study area. Make your dining room the only eating area and eat in your formal dining room all the time. Like, why do you have to have a formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen? You don't have to. You could pick whichever one you want to be the eating one and get the table out of the other one, or make it a new from-home school area or from-home work area. We have a living room and we have a family room, but we don't have to have a living room and a family room. We could have one be the place where you watch TV and you do the fireplace and all that, and the other one become an office or a study or a craft space or whatever you want it to be. It could be anything you want it to be. Another term that I've thrown out there is the hot mess room. So the hot mess room, here's what it is. It is the space in your house, and we all have one. It could be a drawer, it could be a closet, it could be an entire floor of your house. The hot mess room is where you put stuff that you don't know where to put it, or you don't know what you want to do with it, and you just keep shoving things in that space. Most hot mess rooms are a spare bedroom, a storage room, an attic, a shed. It could even be a paid-for off-site storage area. It could be your whole entire house. No judgment here. Hot mess rooms mean that there is absolutely no rhyme or reason anymore. Like, when I say a storage room can be a hot mess room, a storage room is a hot mess room if you just keep shoving things in there. Once you've gone through all accessing, you've done the from hot mess room to organized storage, it's now a storage room. Like, you walk in there, you know where everything is, it's all uniform, all the bins are labeled, everything is done and in your household operations binder, and you know what is in that storage room. It's no longer a hot mess room, it's organized. As you're going through the 100 Day Home Organization program and taking back your home and getting organized, you will create hot mess rooms even if you didn't have one before. Because if there's a little disorder and clutter in every single room in your house, like it was for me in 2012, I created the basement guest bedroom as my hot mess room. It started out as a gorgeous bedroom in January of 2012 where my family could have come and stayed, but by April of 2012, you literally couldn't even close the door anymore. Like, it was floor to ceiling all the way in there, and it was a big bedroom. Like, I think it's like 14— no, it couldn't be that big. 12 by 12, 12 by 14, like a big bedroom. And everything I didn't know what I wanted to do with, or I wanted to sell it or put in a garage sale, ended up in in that bedroom, and then we had a garage sale. So your hot mess room is wherever you're going to put everything you're not sure what you want to do with, or you're going to sell it, or you're going to give it back. As you start organizing, you're going to want to start a hot mess room. It will be the last space that gets organized, and it will be the most difficult space to get organized because there's no rhyme or reason for the things that you put in there. Now, there are a few other spaces that I've created names for that I want to go through with you. One is, uh, again, we need to create in your house an office school supply store. So we collect school supplies, craft supplies, office supplies, and we put them all in different places. It's in the home office, it's in the kitchen, it's in the basement, it's in the craft area. And as your kids age past the age of 7— so if you don't have any children younger than the age of 7 this is the perfect time to gather all of those things into one location. It used to be that if we needed a craft supply, I'd run in the basement storage area and I would get that. If we needed a school supply, I had 3 different locations that I was keeping school supplies in, and office supplies were just all over the place as well. When you can collect all of those craft and school supplies together in one area, this will save you time and money, and you will stop buying more of one thing and not enough of another. Like, we ended up with so many protractors, we had a lot of those, but we didn't have enough markers. Or one of the things you'll notice as your kids are in school is their school supply list will change as they get older. And for us, when our kids were younger, they needed a lot of glue sticks, and they would always need more glue sticks and more glue sticks and more glue sticks. And then eventually I was like, I'm done with this. I think I bought like 100 glue sticks. And then of course that was the year they stopped using glue sticks altogether. So you might have done the same thing. Like when you have a school, a school supply list, you're like, man, we always run out of this thing, and then you overbuy that thing. That's actually how index cards ended up being used in the Sunday Basket was I ended up with way too many index cards and I didn't know what to do with them. And so then I used them in the Sunday basket and they worked so well and they're so inexpensive that every year now I totally overbuy on index cards so that I have plenty to use inside of my Sunday basket. So having an office supply/school supply store in your house— mine has been many places. It used to be in the laundry room, it was in a portion of our kitchen for a while, it was in a basement craft area, and now it's still— it's stored in my living room. So in my living room, I have my great-grandmother's old antique desk that has drawers underneath, and in those drawers is where we store all of our office and school supplies. So if you ever need any of that stuff at our house, you go over there, you go shopping there first, and if it's not there, then we add it to our next office supply order. The next thing that is unique to me is having a drink station. So this came from organizing a family that had 5 kids. I think they have 5 kids. They already had some kids in college. The bulk of them were in high school, and I think they might have had one in junior high when I came to organize their kitchen. And it took me 2 days to organize their kitchen. And so there's 7 people in the family, and they were at that stage of life that I had not yet entered yet because my kids were in middle school, where almost everything that this family consumed was in liquid form. So the mom and dad loved coffee, and then their boys were in sports, and so they did a lot of those power drinks, the, the protein powder drinks. And then they had smoothies, and then they had, um, like cocoa and tea. Like, in every cabinet I was in, there was a water bottle, there was a shaker bottle, there was, there was just drink-related supplies in over 50% of the cabinets that we were in. And I was having a hard time organizing this kitchen because I had mugs in one and then water bottles in another, and then I had smoothie stuff in another. And then they were big into supplements as well, so there were different concoctions and powders that went into all of these different drinks. And I said, okay, we need to create a drink station. And they had a kitchen— um, they had a kitchen desk inside of their kitchen that they did not use at all. So it was a desk, and you can imagine in a kitchen where there's a built-in kitchen desk with kitchen drawers below and a cabinet above it, and she had stopped using this kitchen desk. She was using a Sunday basket, and they had it in a different area of the house, but things were just kind of piling up there. And I said, okay, I want you to just bear with me. We're going to clear out everything out of this upper cabinet above the kitchen desk and everything that was on top of the kitchen desk. And they had two different coffee makers, so I moved both coffee makers over there and their, their mixer blender thing, and then above that I put only their favorite mugs, their favorite water bottles, their favorite everything there, and everything in order to make that coffee. And she said, oh, my husband is not gonna like this, because the coffee makers had been right next to the kitchen sink so they would be easily filled, but she cooked dinner every night and 3 times a day. They were homeschooling. They had so much food going on in this kitchen, but the counter space that was optimal right next to the faucet was taken up by these coffee makers. I said, okay, well, blame it on me. We're going to move it over, all the way over. I said, all you have to do is fill it up with water 2 or 3 times a week. You could just take the reservoir over to the sink, fill it up, and take it. It doesn't need to be next to the sink for you to run the coffee. She's like, "Okay." So as she thought, the family was not happy about this when they came home. They were like, "What is all of this? Like, why is this so far away from the sink? Why did you move all of our mugs?" Yada, yada, yada. Within a week, she called me and she was like, "This is great! This is the best thing we've ever done. It is so easy for me to keep the kitchen clean. It's easier for us to do dishes. We don't run into each other in the kitchen anymore." They had a huge island, So the, the cooking station was behind the island and now you could walk in front of the island to get to the drink station. She said, this is the best thing we've ever done is create a drink station for everything related drinks over on the side. So creating a drink station, organizing your kitchen, not how it was originally intended to be organized, but based on your stage of life. Now, a drink station may not work very well if you have all little kids or if you are empty nesters. But if you have kids that are, you know, between the ages of 12 and 20, then you are in this transition area in your family where literally half of your calories are probably drunk. Think about it. Um, if you have coffee in the morning and then you make some kind of a protein shake and then you have tea later, you might have a glass of wine at night. And I, I tend to have a protein bar in the morning, which I actually keep in my office. I don't even keep that in the kitchen. I usually get a salad for lunch, and then we make dinner a couple of nights a week, or we get fast food, we don't do a lot of cooking in that high school, college phase of your life, you end up using your kitchen for a lot of drinking. Now, if your kids are younger, this is another area of your kitchen that you will want that is different than a drink station, and this is called a lunch station. So I created a lunch packing station when my kids were in grade school. They went to a private school that did not have a lunch program, And so we had to pack the lunch every single day. And so this lunch station, what I created for our kids and I've done in many homes that I professionally organized, had everything you needed in it to pack a lunch. So you can do this in any kind of a cabinet, or it can be a combination of drawer and a cabinet. So when you open up the cabinet and the drawer, you would have the lunch bags, you have Ziploc baggies, you would have individual containers of chips or desserts or snacks, uh, all the thermoses, anything related to packing lunches would be in this one set of cabinets, and that's where everything goes back. So that was a game changer as well. All right, I think that's it for the different names that I have for spaces inside of your house. We have the kids' apartment, mom's condo, having a drink station, having a lunch station, having an office supply store in your home, having a hot mess room where everything unorganized is going. You can extrapolate this out as far as you want, and you could be as creative as I was as a 12-year-old kid and actually physically renaming your spaces. Have fun with this. Talk to your family about this and let the creative one like even create placards like, "This is now our lunch packing station," and "This is our office supply store." Maybe your family is really into crafts and you can have a craft cabinet and, or a craft closet, and everything inside of this closet would be related to crafts. Renaming our spaces does not change the physical makeup of the space, but it changes our mental idea of what is stored in that space and helps us keep order longer. All right, next week we're gonna move on into Phase 5, and this is all about perspective, our mindset. How do we think about the spaces that we need to organize? Have a great week. Thanks for listening to this Organize 365 playlist. You can find more information about these podcast episodes at organize365.com/glossary. I invite you to dive deeper into your organization journey by choosing another topic-specific playlist or listening to our latest revelations on the Organize 365 podcast.