life in a tiny apartment.

Tip #53: Tiny things matter, too.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about importance of organizing the insides: all the little spaces in an apartment that you can close a door on and look the other way. I wrote about how the inside of one of our three toolboxes wasn’t particularly spartan, but how everything had its place, how if I needed our tiny stapler, I would know where to find it.

Here’s the part I missed: the stuff in the other two tool boxes. And if I’m really honest, I also ignored the pile of crumpled sticky notes and the errant bobby pins and the spare change in that one tool box that James did sort through.

As a child of the 80s, I grew up watching a lot of Sesame Street. In fact, in our house, New York’s Channel 13 was the only one we were allowed to watch, so I became somewhat of an expert. One of these things is not like the other? I aced it every time. More importantly, I’m pretty sure it’s responsible for my love of order and organization. That, and my fastidious father. This weekend, I woke up on Saturday morning and decided to really organize. Every solitary screw and tape measure and dried out rubber band came out of our tool boxes. I vacuumed out their insides. I washed them down. I sat in the middle of our “living room” and organized all of the contents according to use and size and this time when I filled the toolboxes, I did it in a way that actually makes sense. I threw away the roll of unsticky tape we’ve been carting with us since North Carolina, I gave one of our two tape measures to a neighbor, and I parted with at least one square of used-up sandpaper.

Working at things little by little is all most of us can manage most of the time, but in my view, there’s nothing so satisfying as a mammoth overhaul. Nothing in these boxes is more than six inches across but strewn across the floor, they take up half of our apartment. It’s nice to know they’ve been corralled. This time, in a way that makes sense.