As I’m sure you can relate, spending a lot of time indoors over the past year has led to unexpected home organizing and rearranging projects. My own home office was not immune to such an activity. I turned the desk 90º to face a different wall. Access to the window was an immedi

I know this sounds harsh and will rub many people the wrong way but it’s a truth: I hate before and after photos. Why? They are kind of boring and formulaic. They show someone is capable of cleaning up and making things look nice. Absent are context, process, and transformative

After reading Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire” soon after it was published, I found myself hungry for more of his words. “A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder,” in which he chronicles the process of building a one-room house for writi

I’m a few weeks late for the Academy Awards, but scores have been on my mind. Far from an avid movie-goer, I’d be hard pressed to match most pieces of music to a film, but I’ve been pondering a different kind of score. These are the types of scores that make hardly a sound

I’ve written about paper before, and I’m writing about paper again. Why? Because one area of life people routinely wish to get under control once and for all is the overwhelming array of papers that congregate in any number of places around the home. While paper can cause

Hot off the press is the January 2012 issue of Cole Hardware‘s Hardware Hotline, and my article, File Retention and Paper Purge 101. Here I share my tips to help you get through piles of paper and down to the essentials. These are the first steps towards organizing your househol