An organizing rant

Wednesday, July 13, I was getting close to the end of cleaning out this store room. I love this organizing project so much! I think part of the reason that I love it is that I get to feel so superior (which I know is not particularly good for my soul, so this is a confession of sorts).

This bin pictured below was the particular task that I was tackling last Wednesday. What was wrong with this bin? So much, so much. Number one is the massive use of excessive plastic. The bin itself is plastic -- although reusable for this project and others -- so semi-understandable. Worse, though, is that the contents were packaged in individual giant Ziploc bags, which is just really a crime against mother Earth from a purely resource perspective.

A bin full of paper decorations

The plastic bags and plastic tub might have been semi-reasonable from an organizing perspective, given the right contents,  except the contents didn't match the storage containers:  what this bin actually contained was a bunch of paper products: borders that go around displays on a bulletin board. I have no idea why we have so many of these types of borders, but the plastic bags are really not a great way to store them. For one thing, it's almost impossible to tell what is in this bin just by looking at it. That makes it really hard for a person new to this space (which is most of the people who use this space) to come in and grab something useful. The bags make it hard to put things away in the right place -- indeed, several of the bags were jumbled. The bags aren't the same shape or size as the borders, so the pieces of paper don't lie flat, so they get warped, and they also take up more space.  And again, who wants to dig through a bin to find pieces of decoration that match?  Lining things up on a shelf would make so much more sense.

See what a rant goes through my head when I sort through a box of stuff?

At any rate, it probably took me a half-hour to sort through this bin.  I sorted the contents by like-with-like, folded (rather than rolled) the borders so they were all the same size and could lie flat, and rubber-banded each set together.  All told, they now take up about 1/6 of that space, and are easy to see/sort through, sitting on a shelf in the store room.  The plastic bags are bundled, waiting some new nefarious purpose, and the giant plastic tub has found new life holding Lunar New Year party paraphernalia  that had been scattered throughout my office.