A professional organizer sounds off about family portraits

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I come from a family that would get a family portrait just about every year by a professional photographer.   A few of them were in matching outfits and some of them were in very nice natural settings.  I give a lot of credit to that photographer and his wife for their skill in wrangling smiles out of all seven of us kids all at once.

My dad would order a large 2’ x 2’ photo print of our family each year to put on the wall in the hall leading down to the master bedroom.  (Okay, I don’t know the actual dimensions, but I know they were large.)  The older we got, the more fun it was to meander down the hall and look at all the family pictures to see how we had changed over time.  When we brought dates home, they were similarly enthralled with the picture wall.

Cut to one year ago when I’m helping my mom go through all her parents’ belongings at her parents’ house to try to decide what to keep.  Her mother (Barbara) is still alive, but now staying with my mom, across the country from Barbara’s house.  Gma Barbara can’t care for her house anymore and will likely never return to it.  In the process of looking for letters, important documents, home movies, photo albums, journals, and so on, my mother finds a large framed black-and-white portrait photograph of her grandfather (my great-grandfather McKnight).  It’s 2’ x 1.5’.  She decides to keep it. 

So my professional organizer mind started thinking about this picture of my GGpa McKnight and I realized what a hassle large family portraits can become over time.  Is GGpa McKnight’s portrait something my mom wants to hang on the wall, or is his picture going to go in a box somewhere?  And if on the wall, why such a large portrait for only one man?  Where is the rest of the family?  From a family history perspective, you want a portrait in a small form so you can copy and share it.  Large portraits in frames make it hard to do that if they are larger than a normal-sized flatbed scanner.

Then I started thinking about all the large family portraits on the picture wall.  What happens to them when my parents die?  They will probably be split among my siblings and I.  But let’s face it; it’s going to be hard for us to choose our favorite picture.   And do I imagine that we’ll settle perfectly on our own choice without some squabbling?  No, it will be a difficult negotiation process.  Looking through the sequence makes them all the more interesting, so I imagine that deep down we’d all like a copy of all the pictures, but none of us will have room at home for them all.   In this kind of situation, family portraits become much more useful if they can be shrunk down to 8’’ x 10” size and put in page protectors in a family history binder or photo album.

This is when I realized that if family portraits had been printed that size (or smaller) in the first place, we would not have this issue to begin with.  

I have clients who store a stack of large framed family portraits of older generations or divorced family because there is no room to hang them on the wall or they are from too long ago, but they can’t get rid of them because it is family history and they can’t find any smaller way to store them.

So here’s my opinion of large framed family portraits:

·      They’re a waste of space

·      They make it hard to pass family pictures on to the next generation because of the difficulty of storing them and sharing them.

·      They’re too big to scan in a normal scanner

In contrast, 8” x 10” family pictures are ideal.

·      They are big enough to frame and put on a wall.

·      They are small enough for the next generation to remove from the frame and put in a scrapbook.

·      They are small enough to put in a flatbed scanner, digitize, and share widely.

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!

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!