rocket city digs

keeping the galaxy safe for small-space living

Posts Tagged ‘organization’

Our $70 Kitchen Renovation

Posted by rocketgirlsf on May 9, 2009

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If you remember from way back in January, I started this blog by giving Le Tour Grande of our kitchen—all 7′ by 6′ of it. While everything above the counter was in reasonably good condition (everything organized and more or less reachable), I didn’t get into the details of the below-the-waist goings-on. One particular corner of our little cucina was particularly shameful: the space between the stove and the wall.

In any home, I wouldn’t want to go fishing around behind the stove; in an old apartment, with no hood over the stove, no counters flush with the stovetop, and all manner of old electrical wiring and piping, no man can know what festers back there. So I’ll simplify by saying Grease + Dust + City Soot * Unreachable, Uncovered Space = Mung. (Mung was a word we used during my NYC days. Two kinds of dirt exist in New York: Schmutz and mung. Schmutz brushes off, like dust. Mung does not.)

Our particular mung magnet was occupied by a little shelving unit (built by RocketMan) that, in any other kitchen, would have been a lovely butcher block. Four wood shelves, supporting by pipes, with wheels at the bottom. Because the sides were open, though, anything that went on the shelves was open to the Mung Invasion, and anything that went in the back of the shelves—crockpot, muffin tin, empty jars—came out feeling a bit like a sticky kiwi. And because I have the memory retention of a two-year-old, I would find myself thinking “We should get a muffin tin” every time I went into Sur La Table.

Enter RocketMan. We decided to build a new shelving unit that would better meet our needs:

  • Enclosed, so as to keep the mung at bay;
  • Flush with the stovetop, so as to prevent splashbacks and food from falling in the crack;
  • Sliding shelving, so we could reach deeper items without having to move the unit or dig for it;
  • Wheeled

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I’ll spare you the photos of what the space looked like after we pulled out the shelf. People have open, airy kitchens will be horrified by our seeming lack of housekeeping skills, and people with kitchens like mine already know exactly what I mean; let’s leave it there. With our specs in hand, I headed off to code software, and RM headed off to schlep lumber. Mine is a rough life.

The Miracle of the Sliding Shelves

Several trips to Cole’s Hardware later, and we had this finished product. It’s light; it’s enclosed; it’s exactly the height of the stove. Lastly, wonder of wonder, miracles of miracles, it has shelves. That glide. Those of you who do not find this miraculous have never wrestled with the wooden drawers in our kitchen’s only built-in: drawers that have no wheels, no brackets, no metal innards, and therefore require nothing less than brute strength to yank them open. And here, in my sixth month of pregnancy, my husband hath hunted and gathered, and brought to our homestead shelves that glide frictionlessly, like a Penguin on a freshly Zambonied rink.

It’s a simple construction: Two sheets of plywood for the sides, pegboard for the back; plywood shelves; and basic wheeled drawer slides. The first time I pulled out the shelf to grab a can, I had to repeat the process three or four times to confirm that, yes, RocketGirl, there is a Santa Claus, and he wears a toolbelt.

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The Aftershocks

After filling the shelves, I turned to see we’d actually committed to a real reorganization of the kitchen. We have so many items on shelves that to put them in an easily accessible space, out of sight, cleared off at least three shelves, and allowed us to move the heavy objects from the highest shelf above the door (the one I feared would cause death by bucket o’couscous). And RM hasn’t even started his second shelving project, in which he performs the miracle of Getting the Cookie Sheets Off the Floor and Onto a Real Shelf. He did, however, throw in this blender shelf.

Here’s the price breakdown. The wood for the sides came from another shelving unit in the kitchen (the one he’s rebuilding next), and the wheels came from the original piece.

Item Price Total
20″ Drawer Slides (12) $10.50/pair $31.50
3/4″ Plywood Sheet $30 $30
Pegboard Sheet $7 $7
TOTAL: $70

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The Amy Vanderbilt Success Program for Heiresses

Posted by rocketgirlsf on February 15, 2009

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Last summer, another Devil-Ette, The Spitfire, picked up a swell collection of pamphlets from the Alameda Flea Market. We shared a bus home from practice, and we spent one lovely ride home reading through selections from The Amy Vanderbilt Success Program For Women. Back in the 60s, it was apparently a book-of-the-month-like club in which women could receive said pamphlets in the mail, offering advice on outdoor entertaining, developing poise and confidence, home safety, etc. She was the Martha Stewart of her day, only she wasn’t a Jersey-born Polish Barnard graduate so much as a Vanderbilt.

The Spitfire gave me one of the pamphlets — “Organize Your Life” — as a surprise gift. Her advice, in most chapters, is quite useful, even today, but the beauty of it is in the presentation. Take this paragraph from the section called “Organize Your Possessions”:

Out with the Gimcracks

Are you one of those people who attracts unwanted gifts? If you have the kind of house everyone admires, you are often, I am sure, the unwilling recipient of house gifts that just do not belong in your house. Through a sense of guilt, do you display these things you don’t like? And are these objects the very ones the cleaning woman never manages to break? (But look at the crack in your Wedgwood pitcher.) There is such a thing as mistaken sentimentality. I am convinced that well-meaning friends go into gift shops and buy blindfolded just for the sake of bringing a gift to someone. When you receive such an inappropriate addition to your household, display it while the friend is present, then put it out of sight until her return… Soon it will be forgotten by everyone… In your annual, semi-annual or quarterly cleanings-out (and these should be a definite schedule) send that angel nightlight or automatic card shuffler or whatever to the always-grateful Salvation Army (and indicate a fair value for what you are giving, asking for a receipt for tax purposes). Try then to educate the constant givers among your friends… Your friends frequently pick up these little clues as to what will please you with relief, and you will be relieved, too, that they are no longer spending good money for what is, after all, in your eyes, trash — and embarrassing trash at that.

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Miss Vanderbilt excels at many pursuits in her life and in this series, but she excels at nothing so much as giving permission to be a first-class snob. You’d think, though, that she would’ve had the foresight to give a wink and a nod to the cleaning woman to knock over the tasteless gimcrack, and hide the Wedgwood pitcher lest the woman’s sticky fingers abscond with the goods.

The brilliant point about this particular passage is that, later in the book, she recommends keeping a “present drawer” as a time-saver. Having so many delightful friends means so many parties, and a woman just simply doesn’t have the time to shop for a gift every single time, does she? So buy generic occasion cards, and a few well-tried gifts, and keep them in a drawer for easy access. It is my secret hope that she found one such generic gift on one of her trips to Salvation Army, and stayed up for several nights wondering which of her friends pitched the crystal-cut vase for tax purposes.

(By the way, I really do think the advice is great. In his book Storage: Get Organized, Terence Conran advises that the #1 item to purge is anything guilt-inducing. Especially in small spaces, you just can’t afford to keep all the stuff you have forever, so the “quarterly cleanings-out” are pretty well necessary. We have a charity bag or box always waiting in our closet for when we finally give up on anything, whether it’s clothes, an item we bought, or a gift. Stuff goes out, stuff comes in.)

My favorite passage in the pamphlet comes on page 50, only four pages from the end, in a section entitled “How Are You Organized for Emergencies?”

I hope that you have fire extinguishers in your house, but having them is not enough. They must be checked periodically. I think I am careful about this, but recently a kind gentleman fixing himself a drink at my bar came downstairs to the kitchen and said, “We are out of vodka and your fire extinguisher needs refilling.” Fire extinguishers are not forever. This man was kind enough to look before our regular check-up time came about.

She’s an excellent hostess, Miss Amy Vanderbilt, despite not being well-stocked in vodka. Was Miss Vanderbilt’s only reaction, “Why, thank you, sir, for telling me about the extinguisher; you may have saved our lives!”? Or might she have reacted the way I would have, which would have been to say, “How the fuck do you know the fire extinguisher is empty? And what happened to the vodka? WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY HOUSE, YOU DRUNK FUCK?” before pushing past him (fire extinguisher and empty Ketel bottle in each hand) to examine the vodka-sodden burn spot on my green shag carpet. Which is why, I suppose, I require the advice of The Amy Vanderbilt Success Program for Women.

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Bert vs Ernie, Part Two: In Sight, In Mind

Posted by rocketgirlsf on January 29, 2009

So last week I blogged about a few systems we’ve implemented to keep me a little more Bert, but that still satisfy the Ernie in me–interim places for Stuff That Would Otherwise Lay Around, And Will Be Put Away Later. This week? Where that STWOLAAWBPAL actually goes.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this last week, but I’m a very out-of-sight, out-of-mind person. I bought a PDA about a thousand years ago, only the scheduling never worked for me, because I never checked it. When I was a kid, and occasionally we’d get neat little calendar books, same thing happened — it went into my backpack, never to be looked upon again. (I solved that problem by writing reminders on my hand.) Once I lost my cell phone, searched my apartment frantically, finally called for a replacement, and then found it. It was in my purse, under an envelope. In my transparent purse, I might add.

Losing things is a grand tradition in my family; not a morning went by in my teen years that my sister didn’t scream that she couldn’t find her hairbrush, or that my mom lost her keys (again) or that I hadn’t misplaced my shoes. (Check in the webbing under the chair in the living room!) We lost our puppy once; we spent an hour shouting for him outside, only to find him closed inside a recliner. Recently I spent four weeks without my favorite sweater, and then had the brilliant idea of actually taking everything out of my sweater drawers to see if it’d sunk to the bottom. I was on the phone with the hairbrush-losing RocketSis, said, “Damn it,” and she knew immediately: I had found it, and would have to tell RocketMan it’d been in my drawer.

My defense to RocketMan? “I come by it honestly!”

(By the by, if you’re looking for a cozy sweater to snuggle up in, but that also has its sporty sweat-wicking, no-smell functions, BUY THAT SWEATER. The prices on the site are New Zealand dollars, so it’s only about 80% of the price you see there. The model makes it look frighteningly Nordic and shiny, but it’s super-soft merino wool and just yummy.)

So this week’s blog is How Not To Lose Stuff, or Keep It In The Public Eye. As always, minimalists, be warned. But take comfort in the knowledge that everything has its home.

Return of the Pegboard

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After finding my jewelry strewn across my dressertop a multitude of times (and the call of “Have you seen my…” breaking up many an evening), RocketMan suggesting using our kitchen pegboard idea in the bedroom. It’s on the wall directly behind the door, so it’s not visible unless you’re about to walk out of the room, so it doesn’t break up the room too much. I painted it to look as close to my favorite Rothko as possible; I do wonder now what abstract expressionists would think of a 21st-century chick hanging jewelry on their paintings, but no crying over spilled color fields.

I love it. I can immediately see all of my necklaces, bracelets, some flowered hair clips; RocketMan’s even taken advantage of it to hang his belts. To the very far left, I hang my stage ponytails (go-go dancers need more hair than I’ve got), close to out of sight. I originally hung them in the middle of the board, but we both agreed waking up in the middle of the night to hairy creatures climbing up the wall was just creepy.

And Then He Said, “Why Don’t You Slice the Bread Before Packaging It?”

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Some solutions are so obvious as to be embarrassing, and this is one of them. I suspect some of you will raise an eyebrow and say, “THAT’S a tip? Really? Duh.” And I congratulate you on your foresight. It took me 33 years of life to discover this solution, and since RocketMan suggested it, I can’t even take credit for that.

My mom stacked clothes in our drawers. Fold the clothes, stack them, stick’em in the drawer. So that’s what I did, too–resulting in the aforementioned loss of the sweater when it slipped too far down, and in countless other drawer-cleaning moments in which I rediscovered a sweater I hadn’t thought of in months, simply because it had gotten wedged into the back of the drawer. We recently bought this extra set of Elfa drawers (at The Container Store, of course), and I was transferring my t-shirts when RocketMan said, “Why don’t you stack the shirts horizontally? So you can see them all at once?”

I felt like Obama had been elected all over again.

In the two weeks since then, I still have the neatest drawers I’ve ever had in my life. I open up my drawer, select my item without having to think “Do I still have…?” It’s amazing. And a big DUH.

By the way, we love the Elfa drawers, and we’ll be installing a full wall system soon. BIG recommendation, though: get these white mesh drawers, not the wire drawers. They’re more expensive, but they’re also more attractive, and the drawer stops work much better.

And All the Other Stuff

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We have several bulletin board systems — one in the kitchen; our grocery list is written on the side of the refrigerator with a dry erase marker; and this one, which is in the L-shaped hallway in the middle of our apartment. It’s hidden to all but whoever’s sitting at the computer. I included it here because I love the system. We wanted a magnet board, and something we could write on, as well, so RocketMan bought a piece of sheet metal, screwed it in to a sheet of plywood, and covered the sheet metal in sticky-backed laminate plastic.

The result: an ideal place to hang airline vouchers we haven’t used, concert tickets, free movie passes, and the occasional Russ Meyer postcard. At the bottom corner is a dry-erase marker for general notes: which albums we’ve downloaded recently (we keep separate iTunes, but often share music); I started writing down when we’ve reupped membership to nonprofits, so I know when we’re actually due to spend more money. It’s basically for all the stuff we don’t need to see every day, but that do require occasional reminders. If those reminders went into a little book, I would inevitably put it somewhere very clever and never see it again.

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Bert vs. Ernie

Posted by rocketgirlsf on January 20, 2009

Living in small spaces can be difficult, but little pleasantries make up for it: the rent, the convenience, less cleaning, smaller electric bills, fewer chances of losing stuff. When it comes down to it, though, you’re still sharing a tiny place with another human being, one who was likely raised in a very different household than yours, and who probably didn’t have a dad who blew his nose in bathtowels.

So system implementation hits the top of the priority list–figuring out what works, what doesn’t work, and coming to some compromise. I’ve only been married 18 months (living together for 4-ish years) but I’ve heard that helps with other aspects of a relationship, as well.

Problem is, I’m an Ernie. I always have been. Cookie crumbs in the bed, splashing bubbles out of the tub, a feeling of real perplexity when my sister (the Bert in my life) became enraged just because I left her YMCA 45 out in the sun. Fast forward twenty years, and I move in with RocketMan, who’s more Bert than RocketSis ever was. He washes the dishes immediately after meals. He puts the cap back on the toothpaste. He puts his shoes away the moment he gets home. He hangs up his jacket (on the coat rack, even). All of these things come easily to him, too; it’s inhuman.

In classic Ernie fashion, though, I wanted to appease Bert, so I began changing my habits. Dishes are a non-negotiable; between the size of our kitchen and the threat of bugs, I adapted. Cap on the toothpaste? No problem. I was long-tired of the Stuff my childhood toothpaste seemed to spawn, anyway.

Other little pickups took longer, though, and we’re still a work in progress. We’ve created systems that work around my forgetfulness and his fastidiousness. Instead of demanding that I absolutely put something away every time, he creates an interim place close at hand–a staging area for my later cleanup. Or he notices I’ve lost something again and builds around it. Fortunately, he’s not so anal that he demands absolute minimalism, and I’m not such a slob that I don’t care about what our home looks like. The real trick is that I’m willing to do something I wouldn’t normally do–if it’s within the bounds of my messy tendencies–and he’s willing to make a small compromise, knowing at least I’m putting something in a home. With any luck, some of our systems might inspire the Berts or Ernies in your life to dial it up or back.

My Favorite Systems

Ponytails and Crosswords

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I love crossword puzzles. A lot. I don’t know if you saw The Simpsons episode this year in which Lisa gets hooked on crosswords, but at the end, when Homer builds in a secret code with Will Shortz? I leaped up from the couch screaming “That was a clue from today! FROM TODAY! OHMIGOD THAT’S THE CROSSWORD I JUST DID!” It was like I’d gotten some SuperGeek decoder ring from the PuzzleMaster himself. 

After a few months of working on crosswords daily–I pick them up, put them down, come back to it a day later–I came home one day to this ingenius system. RocketMan had sticky-Velcroed my correction tape to the corner of a clipboard, attached a pen to the clip, and arranged all of my in-progress puzzles under the clip. He’d done it out of sheer frustration in seeing puzzles flutter to the floor and hearing me ask “Have you seen my pen?” for the sixtieth time in a week.

Next to the crossword clipboard, you’ll see a little appetizer dish serving up two very unappetizing ponytail holders. I have long hair, but I hate wearing it down, so I generally wear it back all day. By the time I curl up on the couch, my scalp needs to relax (and who wants a big ol’ ponytail digging into a pillow?), so I pull out the ponytail, set the holder on the coffee table… and two hours later, I stumble up from the couch, having fallen asleep, and into bed. Two days later, the one holder has multiplied into four, somehow, and RocketMan is wondering how many women actually live in the house. To answer your question, yes, we tried getting me to just take it off in the bathroom, or put it away en route to bed, but it just didn’t happen. So RocketMan set out the little dish, designated it the official Ponytail Holder Holder, and twice a week or so I empty it into the REAL Ponytail Holder Holder in the bathroom.

The Not-Actually-Laundry Laundry Basket

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We implemented a similar system several years ago, when RocketMan noticed a growing pile of clothes on my side of the bed. It was out of sight of the rest of the room, so I didn’t see what the big deal was, but I consented to consider a possible alternative to dumping my clothes on the floor. Here’s the thing–I get home from work, change into my comfy clothes, fall asleep on the couch, and then remove the comfy clothes in a sleepy haze before climbing into bed. They’re not really dirty at that point–I’ve only worn them for five hours, after all, and the most strenuous thing I do in the evening is wash dishes–so they don’t belong in the hamper, so… where do they go, besides the floor? 

They go in this Canvas Stacking Basket from the Container Store. I wear my comfies out of it until I toss them in the laundry, and in the meantime, it’s near enough to the bed that I have no trouble remembering to not leave my clothes in a heap, teenager-style.

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