Organize 365 Podcast Episode 150 - How To SORT A Box

This episode is brought to you by the 100 Day Home Organization Challenge. Are you ready to finally get your home organized this year? Then the 100 Day Home Organization Challenge is for you. Listen at the end of this podcast to learn how the 100 Day Home Organization Challenge can help you get your home organized. Welcome to the Organized 365 Podcast. My name is Lisa Woodruff and I'm a professional organizer and blogger in Cincinnati, I want to help you get your home organized and help you organize life stages and unexpected events. So sit back, relax, and let's get organized. I am so excited to bring you this podcast episode today. I think this one is going to be another game changer and one that you might want to listen to more than one time. And if you like what I have to say, Please share the episode with your friends. And this will be super easy to share because this is organized365.com/150. This is episode 150. And this episode is called How to Sort a Box. All right, for years I have been telling you how to sort different spaces, dividing tasks down into 15-minute chunks. And in the last few episodes, we really talked about the process of getting organized and how it actually starts with decluttering, then goes to organizing and leads to increased productivity. Here's what happens. You want to get started organizing. Let's say you're not in the 100-day challenge yet, or you haven't really tackled an area, or maybe for some of you, you have been through the 100-day challenge and your paper and your house is getting really organized and you're getting really productive, but there is one area That is just super, super hard to tackle, and I have not really given you practical steps yet, and that would be your garage and your storage room. So while you may have tackled those areas and made progress, I bet that there are some boxes stored. You may not even know what's in those boxes, and the thought of going down there and opening those boxes Is just, I mean, right now already, you just have this feeling of dread coming over you. Your energy is going down, and you're thinking, ugh, I listen to Lisa's podcast because she's energizing and motivating, and I am not feeling energized and motivated right now. I understand. There are many reasons why you don't want to tackle those boxes that you have stored in attics and sheds and storage units and All over the place. The reason they're there and the stuff is in a box is because you don't know what to do with it. You're not sure if you should save it, and if you do, you're not sure why you're saving it or who might want it one day. Or heaven forbid, what if a family member asks for something back and you don't have it? Well, you don't even know where it is now anyway because it's just in these unlabeled boxes. Especially if you move often, there are some boxes that just never get unpacked before the next move. Now I've lived in the same house for 20 years, so I have the luxury of knowing where my stuff is because my house is always in the same place. So for those of you that make frequent moves, this is going to be even more important to you than the people who have been living in their house for 20 years like I have. So we are gonna take this one box at a time. When I give information about how to store— organize your storage room or how to organize your garage, I give general broad information. But honestly, there could be like 50 different categories of stuff that's in a storage room. It's one of the most difficult spaces to organize because the purging part of organizing a storage room is very emotional and labor-intensive. And we as professional organizers, when we come in to organize storage rooms, cannot really make purging decisions for you. If we were gonna organize your pantry, well, we'll check all the expiration dates. That's easy. We'll ask you, you know, a series of 15 questions I ask before I organize your paper, and I literally can purge 80% of your paper without your input because you've answered some general questions for me. But when we get in the storage room, it's just not as easy. So how I do it with my clients and how I'm going to do it with you is we are going to go one box at a time. And I am telling you, if you follow the steps I'm going to say here, you are going to be amazed at the progress you make and the speed at which you make it. Now I have a printable of these steps and you can download that at organize365.com/150. All right, number 1, I want you to go get the box from the attic, from the garage, from the offsite storage location, from the basement storage room, wherever it is. And I want you to take it into your kitchen. I know, what am I saying? Oh my gosh, why would I wanna take it in there? You're already thinking, No, I don't wanna take it in there because what if I get it in there and I don't have time to go through it? Or then I'm gonna go through it and I'm just gonna have to carry it back to the storage room anyway, so I'll go through it in the storage room. But I really, really want you to hear me. I want you to go get that box and move it into your kitchen. You can have it be part of your exercise program. This is going to do a couple of things. Number one, I always say, you look at your stuff differently when it's in a different location. So if this box of stuff that maybe hasn't seen the light of day for decades is on your kitchen table, you're going to make different decisions than if you're hunched over in a storage room or a garage freezing or sweating to make those same decisions. So we have climate control, we've got it up on a nice table, we're going to save our backs as we go through this, and we're only doing one box at a time. One box, you can do one box. So you've brought the box into your kitchen. Step 2, I want you to empty the contents of that entire box onto your table and counters. Like, take everything out so the box is absolutely empty so that your cat can climb in there, or a little child, or whatever. Like, it has to be 100% empty, just like we do with the Sunday basket. Take everything out. Okay, now you're completely overwhelmed and stressed because sitting on your kitchen table are things that you don't know what you want to do with, You don't know why you saved them. And where do we go from here, Lisa? Now I just have a mess in my kitchen, thank you very much. Well, step 3 is the, is the big step, and there's a lot you do in step 3. So in step 3, you disperse, you donate, and you decide. So the easiest thing to do is to disperse. If there is something in that box that is somebody else's, we are not putting it back in your storage room. Now let me give you a caveat. If you have children and your youngest child is not yet in 6th grade, you are going to be putting these things back in your storage room. If you have children and your youngest child is in middle school or older, I'm going to tell you to be sending these things to a different location. So if you have children, that's your cutoff here. In the dispersing, And I'm going to give you some examples in a minute and take you through the whole process, but I'm giving you the overall framework first. In the dispersing, we're looking at the items in this box and deciding, are they ours or are they someone else's? Are they your, your spouse's, family member's items? Are they your siblings'? Are they your parents'? Are they your children's'? Are they a friend who came and stored their stuff there and now you've got their stuff on your kitchen counter? If it is not yours, you are not keeping it for yourself or you and your spouse. You and your spouse are the only people we're thinking of here. If you're keeping it for your children, that's not you. If it is for you, this item that you, whatever you decide to keep, is going to go back in your storage room. If it is for someone else, if at all possible, we are going to give that to someone else. Like let's say you were storing this for your sister and you forgot and it's been 5 years. Well, it's time for your sister to get it. Out of your basement or out of wherever. If that's not possible and you have to still store it for her, then I'll tell you what to do in the next step. If this is for your children and your children are in college or older, we are going to label this and put this in their bedroom. If this is for your children and they are 6th grade, you know, they're still using their bedroom every single day, then we are going to label it for them eventually to go into their bedroom. And if they're younger than 6th grade, then it's just still kind of your possession. It's going to go into the basement. So number 1, we're going to disperse. Decide, is this for you or is this for someone else? Number 2, we're going to donate liberally. Like, if it's for you and you have like 3 sets of china that you've ended up opening and you don't even use china, then let's make some decisions. Are you going to keep 1 tea set and saucer from each set so that when you have tea it's an eclectic set, but you can tell everybody about all of your family members who had given you china? Do you have a family of 5, so you're gonna keep 5 place settings of each kind of china and all of one kind of china? Are you going to, let's say you're going through holiday decorations, and donate liberally may be, you know, okay, here are all of our holiday ornaments, but there are 10 that I really don't like, so I'm gonna donate those. So I'll get to more examples in a minute. So donate liberally. And the other step 3 is decide. I want you to decide what is the long-term goal of whatever it is you're storing. So I'll give you examples in a minute. So we're going to disperse, donate, and decide. Now I'm going to go through the disperse part because the donate and decide will be explained in a minute, but if you're going to disperse these items to someone else, or let's say you're saving them for your children, then I want you to pack them back up and label them. Let's say they're for your sister and your sister is living overseas right now, or they're for whoever. I want you to put them in a box with that person's name on it, and then we're going to put that box in one area of the storage room so we know that that stack is actually not yours, they're going to your sister. If they're for your children, I want you to either put them in a box or a plastic bin and color code them so each child has a different color. If you're going to do that in boxes, then get a roll of, Duct tape, and I'll have a link to that in the post where you can get colored duct tape on Amazon. But pick a color for each family member, and then if you're going to put it in a brown box, especially if you travel a lot or move a lot, I would do brown boxes. Then you're going to put a strip of duct tape on that box. So all of Joey's stuff is going to have a strip of red on it. All of Abby's stuff is going to have a strip of light blue on it. That way, when I go in the basement and I see those boxes, those are things I am saving for them when they have a house one day. Those Again, they're being stored in my storage room, but they're not mine. Then what I love is when you have adult children who are using your storage room as if it's their rental space, you can actually move those boxes into their childhood closet of their bedroom. That way it is out of your storage space, and when you're ready to move and you want to downsize, then you can either deliver those boxes to them or you can actually buy a rental locker Storage, portable storage thing, whatever they're called. You know, the thing where you drive up and you drop your stuff off and you drive away, but you keep the stuff and you pay for it. You can move that to an offsite rental storage place and everything is already labeled in there. So when the kids do get their house, they can go get their stuff out of there and it's no longer in your house and you can downsize. Now step 4 is to repackage and label. So I kind of told you what you're going to do with family members, but with your own stuff that you're going to keep in your storage areas, I want you to repackage package and label them uniformly. What I prefer is that you get plastic, clear plastic bins that have colorful lids on the top and that all of the colorful lids are the same color for you. Like all of my Christmas ones have red lids and the base is clear. And actually all of mine have red lids because I bought them all at the same time and that's fine. The color of the lid does not matter. But I want you to get clear bins. So if you have in your basement, this is, I know because I see this all the time, you've bought your bins that you store stuff in over the last 30 years, and some are that blue color and some are hunter green and some are red and some are orange 'cause you were buying them at Halloween and that looked like fun. And so you have all these different solid colored bins in your basement, and they're all different sizes because you bought them from different manufacturers at different stores. The ones I use every time we organize someone in Cincinnati with Organize 365, I buy at Walmart, and they're the Walmart brand. They're called Homz, H-O-M-Z. They hold up just fine, and they have gray lids. They're a clear bin, a big clear bin with a gray lid. And the reason I buy this specific size and kind is because it's the least expensive. I think they're like $5 or $6 per bin. Which is not bad, and they are easy to carry. They're not so big that you need 2 people or you throw your back out. You can carry them comfortably in your arms upstairs, especially the holiday decorations and all of those things. But more importantly, they perfectly fit on my favorite bookshelves, which is the Home Depot brand of bookshelves that I've talked about before. They're very lightweight, easy to put in a cart, easy to put in your car, easy to move when you move, but very, very sturdy. And they snap together. They're plastic, they snap together. You can use actually no tools whatsoever, but I've recently bought a rubber mallet and I use that when I assemble them all the time. I like things that are sturdy and lightweight and easy to use and easy to see. So when we do a storage room here in Cincinnati, we charge, I think it's $100 to go get all of the bins and a shelving unit for each Each shelving unit that we do. So that's about what you could estimate. It might be a little bit less because you don't have our shopping charge in there. So to get each of those plastic units at Home Depot will store 10 bins. So the bins are going to be about $50. Yeah, that's about $100. $50 to $60 for the bins and $40 for this shelving unit that I like. And all of that will be linked in the post, organized365.com/150. I'm making myself a note because I need to tell you that. Home Depot bins. So it's the Walmart bins, best priced, and fit perfectly on the Home Depot brand bookshelves. That's just what I love to use. You may find a different system. Figure out what system you're going to use. That's step 5. Figure out a shelving system, and once you know what you have, then you'll buy the shelving. You don't need to buy the shelving first, but I would like it when you're repackaging and labeling things that they're all going into these plastic bins. I know this could be a $200 to $300 investment when you go through your entire storage room, but I think it's worth it because can you imagine, can you imagine going down into your storage room and everything looks nice, you know what's in everything? I mean, already now, aren't you feeling more uplifted? Aren't you feeling like this is doable? Okay, one box a day, I want it to look like that. It is an investment that you will make that will pay off for decades to come. And for future generations that have to go through your storage room one day. So if you're in your 40s like I am, this $200 to $300 investment is going to pay off for the next 60 years plus, and my children will always know what's labeled in my basement. So let's break this down. I'm going to go through 4 different kinds of boxes that you're going to find and give this to you in a practical way. Number 1, We're going to talk about holiday items because everybody has holiday items and that's pretty universal. So number 1, you're going to take the box upstairs. You may have actually already done this this past holiday because I've talked about it a lot. For this one, you could wait until the holiday time. You don't need to take it up right now. But it's spring. If you're listening to this in real time, it's winter, so I have all my snowmen up and pretty soon it'll be spring. And when I brought up my snowman collection— yes, you may not have a holiday snowman collection, but I do and it is quite extensive. Oh, I do too. Extensive, I must say. So when I put up all my snowmen— way too many snowmen— I had too many. So I actually did donate 6, and I felt bad sending those poor little snowmen to Goodwill, but somebody will love them. I know they will. So I decided, and I donated, and I— all the snowmen are mine, so I don't have to disperse them to anyone. So I took the box upstairs, I emptied the box on the table because I actually set up the snowman display. Oh, that's nice. Number three, I didn't have anybody to disperse my snowmen to, but I did donate a few, and I did decide what I would do. And this year, what I did was I displayed my snowmen differently than I usually do. There was one that was going to end up in the donate pile, and Greg even said it could. He had bought me it, but he really liked that snowman. And what I ended up doing was moving that snowman and this beautiful picture that my neighbor who has since moved she's an Awesome artist has done of this snow day. It's called Snow Day. I'll put a picture of that in the post too. Oh, it's so gorgeous. I put it on my bath. So I now have this picture and the snowman in my bathroom. So my snowmen have moved all the way upstairs into my bedroom because I didn't want to get rid of them, but that's okay because I did the step of decide. I decided I didn't want to get rid of that snowman, and I decided I didn't have to hang up this picture. I could just set it in my bathtub, and I love my nightly bath. So now I have snowmen in my bath area, and I've decided actually that I think I am going to decorate that area seasonally. So now I'm going to have seasonal decorations in my bathroom. Maybe not the decision you're going to make, but it's the one I did. So step 4 is to repackage and label. So I have my snowman collection used to be in 2 bins. It's down to 1, and I have a nice label on there that says snowmen, and then that goes downstairs, step 5, into my shelving system. All right, the next kind of box we're going to talk about is baby items, because almost everybody has baby items in their storage room, even if it's your baby items that your mom has given you. Usually you have baby items. I want you to take it upstairs. Many of these boxes will not have been opened since the time they were packed. So if you have your childhood stuff, when was the last time you looked at that? Yeah. You haven't. Or if you packaged up stuff when your kids were babies and now they're in middle school, high school, or grown, when was the last time you looked at that box? Yeah, you haven't. So I want you to take it upstairs and I want you to empty the box on the table. Now, if you're married and you're doing your kids' stuff and they're older, let your spouse be with you because you will have such a fun time talking about, oh, you remember when they wore this little outfit? Or, oh, I remember reading that book to them or playing with that toy. Spouses love to be involved in the memory thing, and you know how I love having these discussions about the memories instead of just storing the stuff. Now what's going to happen when you empty this box on the table is you're going to want to keep everything. I understand. But you're going to find a lot of items have been ruined with spit-up that you didn't realize that spit-up was— had ruined the clothing. So now is a good time to get rid of that and just keep the pieces that really could be reworn. by a future grandchild or in the future. If you're not sure, wash 'em. You're already upstairs anyway, might as well wash the clothes before you put 'em away, right? So wash 'em. Number 3, disperse, donate, and decide. So disperse. If these are your children's baby clothes and you're going to give them to them one day, then go ahead and wash 'em again, figure out what's gonna be good, and package it up. So even if your kid's only in 6th grade, 15, 20 years from now when they have their kid, you already have that step done. And you're going to feel good knowing that, okay, I know what I'm saving and I'm purposely saving it, as opposed to, I saved everything and I shoved it in the basement and I'm gonna think about it one day. So let's be more purposeful about it. Number 2 is donate liberally. So if you saved like 4 bins of clothes for your kids and you've decided they're each going to get 1 bin, go ahead and donate. And then number 3 is decide. So actually, the podcast next week, I'm going to be talking about clothing that you've saved in your storage room. So don't donate it all yet. Wait until you listen to that podcast and decide what you want to do. Do you want to make a baby quilt out of these clothes for you at your house for future grandchildren? Do you want to do that for your children? Do you want to— you know, what do you want to do with this clothing? Why is it being saved? What is the purpose? Same with the baby clothes that are yours. If you have any of your baby clothes or your items from when you were a child, how much do you wanna save and for what reason? All right, step 4, repackage, label, and put in uniform bins. And step 5, put in a shelving system. So you may decide you have 4 bins of kids' clothes, each child is gonna get 1 bin, and you're gonna get rid of the rest, or whatever you're gonna do. Repackage it all. All right, number 3, we're going to talk about photos, and I'm going to be talking about photos in 2 weeks on the podcast, more about photos, but right now these are my general photo organizing tips. I am going to be going into more on photos this year. I'm going to sprinkle the podcast throughout the year. You know, I was a Creative Memories rep for over a decade. I love photos. I have over 100 photo albums myself. So photos are a big deal to me. I really, really love having my own history preserved in photos. When you decide to tackle photos, organizing photos, especially if you were born, let's say, after 1985, almost everything you have is probably going to be digital. But if you're like me, you're in your 40s or older, you're going to have a lot of photos that are in your storage rooms and Nobody really knows what to do with them, but everybody feels guilty about what they haven't done with them, and nobody wants to get rid of them. So my suggestion to you right now would be, you need to have a place where all photos go. So start a box that says photos. You're gonna want smaller boxes for this, not a big clear box, but I would get a clear box with a lid, and I would start having photo boxes, because as you go through everywhere, every room in your house, you're gonna find photos, or the kids bring school photos home, or somebody mails you a photo. photo or Christmas card photos. There are photos everywhere. So step 1 in organizing photos is just getting them in one location so that when you're ready to tackle that project, you can. Now if you find a box of photos, you bring the box upstairs, thank you very much, now I have a whole box of photos, I just have to carry that back downstairs. Well, if you have some time, what I'd love for you to do is to put that box in the family room, and as you're watching TV, Just pick up a handful and flip through them, and if there are any blurry duplicates or scenery pictures, pitch them, and only keep pictures of people. That will save you so much time when we get to the next step in photo organizing. So number 1, get all the photos in one place, and I would get a box about the size, double the size of a plastic shoebox. So you know what a plastic shoebox is, about double that size and only as high as a plastic shoebox. You'll find it. You'll be in the plastic aisle. You know what I mean. Whatever's comfortable to carry photos in. Photos in and just start sorting them in there. And as you move your photos from the box into these plastic boxes, you know, go ahead and get rid of some. It's okay. It's okay to get rid of printed pictures, especially if they are duplicates, blurry, or scenery. And if you don't have the time to figure out if they're duplicates, only get rid of scenery and blurry pictures. Now some scenery you might want to keep, like if it's your houses that you've lived in, you might want to keep some of that scenery. But for the most part, pictures of when your grandparents traveled to Italy, if you're not from Italy, you don't need those pictures. You can go to Italy if you want. If they're from their trip back, you know, if your ancestors are from Israel and they went to Israel and took all these pictures, then yes, you're going to want to keep those pictures. But for the most part, people who are not you other people who have given you pictures of where they've traveled, you don't need pictures of those. You have Google. And blurry, we don't need. So get all the photos into boxes, and then once you start labeling these boxes just photos, that's all, we're not doing anything other than saying these are photos, as you find photos around the house, you can just walk down and add those to that bin. And the 4th one is going to be how to sort a random box. Raise your hand if you have a random box. Raise your hand if all of the boxes are random. Okay, good job. I hope you were driving. That was fun. Is anybody looking at you in the other cars? No? Okay. All right, so the random boxes are the ones where this how to sort a box goes the best. So you're going to pull a box upstairs, you're going to empty it all on the table, and it's going to be literally random, especially if you move a lot and you have packers move you. When we unpack houses where packers have moved, I'm like, what, what are these packers doing? If you're a packer, let me know. Like, they will wrap up trash. I'm sure they're just supposed to wrap everything. And not only will they wrap up trash, but they will wrap it up so safely, this trash isn't going anywhere. So you may have some boxes like this where you open up and you're like, why did this even get moved from one house to the next? So just In this one, we are going to be donating and trashing liberally, right? And decide, do you really need that second blender? When you unpack this box, is there room for this stuff in the current house that you have? If not, are you going to move to a house where you'd have room for this stuff? Is this stuff really that valuable that I— you really, really want it? How long has it been in the box? If it's been in the box forever, do you really— you didn't know you had it. You didn't know where it was. Do you really need it? And more importantly, can we disperse it to anybody else? Is there anybody else we can give it to? So disperse, donate, and decide. And then what you're going to have is this little pile of stuff that it's not seasonal, it's not baby items, it's not photos, it's just stuff. Like, how, how am I gonna do step 4, which is repackage and label when it's like a blender and an old curling iron and a fan, or, you know, it's just they don't make any— they don't go together. How do I repackage? What I want you to do is you can go ahead and reuse your regular box on this, and I want you to label it on the outside. So you can use a Sharpie, or you can tape an index card or just a sheet of paper to there, and on, on the sheet of paper, write what's in there. Extra toaster, blender, whatever. You may be saving this because you have a kid about to go to college or for whatever reason you're not ready to get rid of it, but obviously this is not a box that's going to be labeled and in our nice Pinterest-looking storage room at the end. Step 5 is the setup shelving in the system because step 5 is really done after you go through all the boxes. So go through all the boxes, take them upstairs, empty it on the table, disperse, donate, decide, and repackage and label. These boxes are just going to be repackaged and labeled as in miscellaneous. And you may have a whole corner of your storage room that you repackage and label as miscellaneous because you're going to go through those boxes again. This is not a once and done. This isn't, you know, a perfect thing. This is the perfect way to go through a box. This is your first pass through all of the boxes. Everyone's going to come upstairs. You're going to know what you have. You're going to repackage what you can. You're going to take it downstairs. Once you've gone through every single box in your storage room, your attic, whatever it is, then you're going to assess. That's when you're going to buy the shelving. You go ahead and buy the plastic totes that you know are going to fit on the shelving you're eventually going to buy, but you don't buy the shelving until you know how many bins you have filled. Also, side note, why I really, really like the Home Depot shelving— and no, Home Depot is not a sponsor, but maybe they should be. One of the reasons I really like it is it has 5 shelves, so you have a bottom shelf and then 4 more shelves, so you could put bins on the top if you want, but you can also set up the shelving so that you have 3 shelves together and then 2 shelves next to that, which works really well when you have these small crawl spaces, attics, or spaces like that. So I love that shelving unit because What works in this house may not work in your next house, but the shelving unit will match whatever house you live in. So if you're— I'm thinking about some of my friends that have attics instead of basements. I have a basement storage area, but they have attic storage areas, and these shelving units work in those attic storage areas as well. And they're easy to get up there because you can totally break it apart, and you— it's so fast, and it's not rigid like metal or— Whatever, it's fine in different temperatures too. So I really like that shelving unit. All right, so now imagine, imagine you've been through every box in your storage room. Yay, good job! Okay, so you have every— you've gone through every box the first time. And let's say you had 100 boxes to go through. You may say that's a lot of boxes, but when you start counting, you'll realize, ugh, bags and boxes and everything, there's a lot down there. There is a lot in your storage room. So you've gone through those. I would say usually you go through the holiday boxes each year, and if you didn't put it up this year or last year, you can probably donate it. People get really stressed out about, oh, it's February, I can't donate that stuff in February. What will Goodwill do with it? They will figure it out. And, you know, if you saw something really cute— everybody starts shopping for Christmas in July. Like, don't worry about what's going to happen to your stuff when you donate it. Just make the decision if you want it or not. If you don't want it, time for it to go. They will figure out people in other climates who are ready to have your stuff when you're ready to get rid of it. Obviously, I'm not a detail or a perfectionist kind of person. So when you go through and do these boxes, you will probably have, I would estimate, maybe if you did 100 boxes, 25 to 30 that you're like, oh, those are awesome. Yes, okay, I got the right Box, I got the right lid, I know what's in there, I feel really confident with what I've organized in there. Then you're probably gonna have like 50 where you're like, all right, well, I'm not really sure, so I kind of kept it, or these are all my sister's, these all need to go to this person, but I have to store them until whenever. It's not going to be perfect. When I did my storage room, I would say each time I made about 20% improvement progress. So what that looks like is— The first time I did it and I was able to go through my holiday decorations, I set up one of these Home Depot shelving units and everything was in the pretty bins, but if you turned around, the rest of the storage room looked like a hot mess still. And so if you can get one wall looking great each time you do this progress, that's awesome. So one wall with all the holiday stuff and maybe all the baby items get really organized this time, but the photos is just your first pass-through and all the other boxes we have to figure out what to do next. But you've been through all the boxes, so you have an idea what you have. So when you have a summer party and you're like, you know what, we need an extra mixer, you're like, yes, I have one of those and it's down there and I have a general idea of where it is. And you can probably find it in 5 to 10 minutes as opposed to going out and buying another blender when— because you didn't know you had it in the storage room. After you get through phase 1, Phase 2 will be going through those boxes that are still miscellaneous, but they're things you want to keep, and then matching them up. So what you might find is, okay, after I've been through all the boxes, because we're just doing one at a time, I'm thinking that there is probably enough stuff in there to make a kitchen box where I have an extra blender, and that's where I keep the turkey fryer, and that's where we keep the Christmas cookie supplies. Mm-hmm. And then you go down there, sure enough, yep, you pull everything out of those random boxes into one box and label it extra cooking supplies, and you put it on the Home Depot shelf. The other thing that you might want to set up is just a Home Depot shelf without any bins, and that will be your— Carol loves this— your interior decorator shopping. So she says, you know how your decorating changes all the time? There's a lot of decorating stuff that ends up in storage rooms, pictures and— Decorations. Plants and lamps and vases and all that stuff is down there. You set up a bookshelf and then you put those items that you aren't currently decorating with but you might decorate with on that shelf, and then when you get the urge to redecorate your house, you go look at your own inventory first before you go buy anything else. All right, I hope that that gave you a lot more support on organizing your storage area and how to sort a box. Now let me tell you what's coming up. Next week, we're going to be talking about what to do with these baby clothes. And then the week after that, I'm going to be talking to you a little bit more about organizing photos, because the last week in February, I'm going to launch March Madness. So February for me is the month of going through memorabilia because it's the month of love and memories. And that's what all of the podcasts are going to be about. But then in March, we are going to do a family March Madness challenge. I am so excited about it, I cannot even tell you. But having this knowledge about what we're doing in the storage room is really gonna help you be successful when we do the March Madness challenge together. So are you gonna do it? Are you going to take one box upstairs and start sorting? And there's no timetable on this. Like you could decide, yes, I'm going to do a box a day, or I'm going to take up a box And once I'm done with that box, then I'll get the next one and I'll go at my own pace. But find a place in your dining room or in your kitchen where you can set one box at a time and have that be your winter challenge to just go through these boxes one at a time and really make some progress. All right, you're going to hear about the 100-day challenge, and as I've told you, I'm not closing that anymore. It's just ongoing. When you've decided, yes, I am ready, I am going to get organized, and these step-by-step things that Lisa tells me to do, that sounds like that's going to work for me, I her 100 15-minute-a-day challenges so I can go through my whole house. Currently, we are upstairs in the master bedroom. We've just finished the closet, we've just finished the bedroom, and we're moving on to organizing our master bath. You would not believe how long it takes to organize a master bath. So come join us, and then the rest of the challenge— we're about halfway through— the rest of the challenge is all going to be each week is its own space. So it's super easy to jump in now. Because if we're doing electronics organization, that's a week. If we're doing home office, that's a week. If we're doing books and media, that's a week. So it's really, really easy at this point to jump into the 100-day challenge. The only time you end up jumping in and you're in the middle is when I get to the kitchen, 'cause I spend 3 weeks in the kitchen. And a whole bunch of people just finished the kitchen challenge, and one of them said, I am so glad that you spend 21 days in the kitchen. I've done other challenges that are 3 to 5 days long, but you don't really get the whole kitchen done. Trust me, when you're done with my kitchen organization challenge, your kitchen is organized. I mean organized organized. So it's super fun. So how I'm doing this is when you sign up for the 100 day challenge, you will get immediate access online, and then you will go into a holding pool, and you will get your first daily challenge on the next Monday after you sign up, so that you'll join right at the beginning of a week, and you'll go right through, and you can get into the Facebook group. Right away. So I would love it if you want to join the 100-Day Challenge, and don't forget to go get your printable about how to sort a box over at organize365.com/150. Have a great week. Lack of motivation, not knowing where to start, and being overwhelmed were the top 3 reasons listed in the Organize 365 survey for why you haven't gotten organized yet. Listening to this podcast is a great way to get motivated, and let me encourage you as you tackle your home organization projects. But what about that feeling of overwhelm and the inability to get started? The 100-Day Home Organization Challenge is designed to reduce the overwhelming task in front of you to manageable daily organizational tasks. Colorful weekly checklists And a 2 to 3 minute daily video sent directly to your email inbox will tell you exactly what to do each day so that you can start to make lasting organizational progress in your home. You don't have to know where to start. I do. If you're ready to actually get organized this year, my 100 Day Home Organization Challenge will help you reach your goal. The 100 Day Home Organizational Challenge has a rolling start, so whenever you're ready, sign up and join us. Sign up at organize365.com/100-days. I can't wait to help you get organized.