Do you really need to seasonally change your décor?

One of the ways that our consumer culture tries to get us to buy more is to attempt to convince us in trendy magazine articles that we must redecorate every time the season changes.  The rationale is that the change gives the house a fresh look.

As a professional organizer, I take exception to this because it multiplies clutter.

• If you are into the seasonal décor thing, that means each season you have 3X more out-of-season décor you have to store someplace! 
• If you feel the need to change your décor every three months, that’s an indication that your décor isn’t meaningful enough or doesn’t have enough of a visual impact for you to want to display it all the time.

I recently saw an article that suggested changing out sofa throw pillows, flowers, table center pieces, wreaths, books, family pictures, and chalkboard quotes.  Here’s my response:

Change out sofa throw pillows—To speak frankly, your couch must be boring if you have to buy throw pillows to make it interesting.  A couch is such a big part of the room and stays there for so long that it really is worth shopping around (or ordering something custom) in order to find a couch that will remain visually fresh to you all the time.   (And if you’re wondering, yes, I did take my own advice on this.  My couch is hyper-actively rainbow-colored.)

Flowers—I’m not complaining here if you use fresh flowers.  But if you rotate through arrangements of fake flowers, it is possible the flowers arrangements aren’t giving you all the visual impact that you need. 

Change out wreaths—Once upon a time, people used to make their own wreaths out of plants they gathered themselves.  Once the wreath decayed, it went into the trash or the compost heap, so there was nothing to clutter storage spaces.   Multiple fake wreaths are just more to store.

Chalkboard quotes—If you do this, don’t do it just because it is the fashion.  Do it because the changing quotes help you stay inspired.  Chalkboards are messy and not inherently attractive.

Change out the books on display—I’m sorry, but rotating books on display just because of the different covers seems so shallow to me.  Books are an ingenious device for transmitting one person’s ideas across time and space to another person, a repository of thought and knowledge.  Aren’t you interested in reading them? 

Changing out family pictures from frames—If you’re changing out the large family pictures, you probably have too many pictures.  If you’re changing out the small pictures, your pictures probably aren’t nice enough to stay up all the time.  If your small pictures are nice enough to stay out all the time, you probably should blow them up larger (but not too large) and frame them so they will have more visual impact. (8” x 10” is just right.) (I'll say more about family pictures soon.)

Changing out table centerpieces—If you’re changing out centerpieces, your centerpiece collection is taking up valuable storage space. 

DO NOT BUY INTO THE ADVICE TO ROTATE YOUR DÉCOR!   It is just a ploy to get you to buy more and it will just fill up your storage with low priority stuff you don’t really need.

Instead, acquire pieces with maximum impact that you will enjoy looking at for years and years.  

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services! Did this article help you? Be sure to share it with your friends!

Strategies to see through the marketing in magazines

Magazine marketers love to show their products in the most favorable and attractive context.  They know that consumers aren’t just buying a product, they are trying to buy a “vision” of what they want their lives to be.     Just remember, every vision is made up of individual elements, and if you were to consider the individual pieces alone, you might not care so much about certain parts, and appreciate other parts more. 

When you see a beautiful picture and you want that for yourself, try using your imagination to eliminate elements from the picture in order to discover what about it excites you.  Imagine the walls a different color.  Imagine the piece of furniture without anything on it.  Imagine how your stuff would look there.   Doing this exercise helps you narrow down what exactly you like about the picture.  Incorporate only what excites you and nothing else. 

I was looking at the Container Store’s website and happened to look at their desks.  Their desks were very appealing.  They showed them with magazine storage boxes, little sculptures, a pretty wall color behind them, a laptop open on the working surface, and little flat file boxes in coordinated colors arranged on the shelves above.   I found these pictures so attractive, that I knew it was important to me to figure out what exactly I liked about them because if I was to go ahead and buy any of those desks, if I was buying the vision and not the product, I would be disappointed if I didn’t end up with a setup that looked just like those pictures.  So I used my imagination and pretended that everything on the desks were gone. 

Guess what? Looking at those totally bare desks, I could see they were completely boring!  If I had only bought a desk, I would be disappointed that it didn’t look like the pictures when I got it put together.   If looking at the empty desk was boring, then that meant that I found the stuff on the desk the attractive thing.  But this I found to be completely silly.  After all, it wasn’t my stuff arranged or organized according to my needs, so if I bought that stuff for myself and merged it what I already had, it wouldn’t look anything like that picture at all.  (And I could tell that based on the way I organize stuff, the color-coordinated flat file boxes would be completely useless!) 

I looked at some decorating blogs because I was trying to figure out how to decorate my fireplace mantel.  I saw this one picture that had a really artistic-looking fireplace—it had candles, some plants and topiaries, some pictures, some little knickknacks on pedestals.. I thought, “Now that is cute.”  But then when I started looking at each individual thing, I discovered that not a single one of those things would have been something I would have picked up excitedly in a store and bought.  Not one single thing was cool enough in and of itself to justify my buying it; it was only the artistic arrangement of all the elements that was attractive.   But that’s not the way to buy stuff!  You don’t buy stuff all at once because you have a vision of exactly how you’re going to arrange it (at least I’m not that skilled.  Usually you buy things one thing at a time because each little thing appeals to you somehow.  I still don’t have a decorated mantel, but I expect someday

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services! Did this article help you? Be sure to share it with your friends!

8 Perils of home decorating magazines

I like looking at home decorating magazines as much as anyone, but over time I've noticed that they can be dangerous.  Not dangerous in the sense of bodily harm, but dangerous in the sense of insidious materialism.. 

1 The most important thing to remember--decorating magazines deal in fantasy and they exist to market products for their advertisers.  (Remember, they have to make a living like everybody else, so they have to keep finding things to publish.)  Much of what they sell is cute but is also clutter, and each month they will show you something different.  They may keep you in a perpetual state of discontent with your own home. If your goal is to be happy, then you want to avoid anything that makes you discontented with what you have.

2 They show pretty pictures of STUFF that people can’t afford to buy, nor have time and energy to make or assemble themselves, nor have a need for.

Example #1 – I’ll never forget a picture I saw in Better Homes and Gardens of a series of shelves (big shelves too) entirely devoted to just ribbon.  Very pretty, but who are the people who regularly use shelves and shelves of ribbon?  Not me! 

Example #2  – I also remember a picture of a gift-wrapping corner, complete with desk and ribbon and paper and gift bags and tissue paper and scissors and tape.  But who wraps gifts so often that they need an entire corner devoted to it?  There’s Christmas, birthdays, and the occasional wedding and graduation gifts.  Unless your business is wrapping other peoples’ gifts, there’s no need for a gift-wrapping corner!

3 These magazines are so hypnotizing that frequently women feel like they have to keep them around in case they might need to do a craft in them.  Need?  For when?  If the need hasn’t appeared yet, it is not very likely to appear in the future!   Not only that, but if the need suddenly appeared, it is almost certain that particular magazine would not be found except by a long, arduous search through every single magazine.  Which issue was it in?  (scratching head) What page?  (At the very least, tear out the ads so that you don’t take all your time paging past them!)  Did you know that these magazines repeat content every few months?  You really don’t need to save that magazine.

4 I’ve also noticed in those decorating pictures there is a tendency to overdo it with the knickknacks and the coffee table books.  Try covering up those piles of books or those clusters of knickknacks with your finger and then see what the room looks like.  Does it seem “blah”?  Then the room is only “fake” pretty and not “real life” pretty.  “Real life” pretty is when the things you use all the time contribute beauty.   I recently looked at some pictures of decorated fireplace mantels and I noticed that although the general arrangement of objects on or around the mantel was artistic, when I looked at each individual object, I would never have found it interesting enough to buy for its own sake. 

5 Advertising in magazines (and catalogues) are cunning about showing what I call “add-ons” in the product pictures.  You know what I mean if you’ve ever seen a picture that is supposed to be selling a bookshelf and you get excited about the rug in the picture instead.  You pretty much have to mentally block out all the other stuff in the picture except for the product for sale in order to get an accurate idea of what you would actually buy.  Have you ever seen the wall-desks sold on the Container Store’s website?  If you believe in their pictures, you are buying into this vision that includes color-coordinated boxes for paper, little artsy knick-knacks, a wall painted and patterned in that hip lime green or robin’s egg blue, and a Macbook laptop.  To keep from getting sucked up in that, you have to imagine the object stripped of its add-ons and consider whether it is still interesting by itself.

6 If a real family lives in those houses, you know that the photographed rooms were most likely staged (i.e. the “real life stuff” was moved somewhere else so that it didn’t clutter up the picture).  And afterwards, if the kids were home, things probably got messy again in about 5 minutes.  Where do the cell phones charge?  Where is the homework done?  Where are the art supplies for kids coloring?  Where are the backpacks and coats?  Where are the library books, the musical instruments, the piano music, mom’s purse and dad’s wallet?  Where is the dog’s water and food dish or the pet grooming supplies?  Where are the remote controls, the videos, the video game equipment?  Where are the tissues for blowing your nose?  Decorating magazines do not take into account real life.

7 At some point the decorating magazines started advocating changing décor on a seasonal basis, creating this expectation that we have to have our homes decorated in perfect correspondence to every season or holiday.  Say what?  This creates a burden in one of two ways—either your storage space gets wasted by all the decorations for the seasons, or your money gets wasted buying decorations every season and getting rid of them afterwards.  And furthermore, getting out and putting away all those decorations throughout the year takes time that could be spent on better things.  Whatever happened to just decorating for Christmas? 

8 Decorating magazines always talk about “makeovers,” which are essentially spending lots of money to completely redo everything in a particular room (or house).  What is more practical is “evolution,” which consists of thoughtful purchases made over a period of years in such a way as to create the desired look.  This is the financially sound way to do it, and it allows you to cultivate patience.  Also, the pleasant anticipation of achieving the vision is drawn out over a much longer period.

So next time you look at a decorating magazine, if you must look, look with a critical eye for the reality behind the marketing.  Seeing the reality can help you be content with what you have.  If you are content with what you have, you won’t feel the need to buy more.  You might even find you can purge from your space the décor that means less to you.  Don’t let it stay a minute longer if you don’t absolutely love it.  Decorating magazines can inspire you through their pictures to work toward an uncluttered home, but you just have remember that they don't show the reality of where to store the little things you use in real life.

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services!

Organizing help for writers

On my other blog "Lightning Spice Writing," I posted about how writers can deal with all the papers and hard copies of things they have written throughout their life.  


Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services!

What to do with all those magazines?

Many organizing books and professional organizers will tell you that you should deal with those stacks of magazines by going through them and tearing out the pages of the articles that you really want to save and then put those pages into binders.

I say something completely different.

DON’T DO IT.

Just DON’T.

TOSS them without looking at them.

Here’s why. First, magazine articles are so short and shallow these days that it is likely that any advice you find in a magazine will be common sense that you can find on the internet if you search for it. Yeah, magazine articles are fluff these days. Second, if the craft ideas don’t grab you in that intense “OH-MY-GOSH-I-MUST-MAKE-SOMETHING-LIKE-THAT-IMMEDIATELY-OR-I-WILL-DIE” way, you will never do it and you will likely never look at it again. Looking at it and thinking, “Oh, that’s cool” is not a strong enough reason to keep the craft idea. You’ll never get to it, with all the other important and urgent things of life. You just won’t, and it’s not because you’re a weak person. In fact, you won't get to them because you are a strong person; you will find other activities more important. And you’ll be perfectly right NOT to get to it, because IT ISN’T IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO YOU.

So dump those extra magazines in the recycling bin. Or blindfold yourself and do it. Or ask your Significant Other to do it at the dead of night while you are asleep so you won’t know of the deed until it is an accomplished fact.

Get rid of them.