Have you ever noticed how many wires are in the sky in most cities? It’s kinda nuts. They’re everywhere! Wires upon wires upon wires.

I am so grateful for the modern technology and convenience these wires offer…but what I recently realized is that some of these wires are unnecessary. They’re old connections for cable and phone companies and the wires DO NOTHING.

Similarly, you may have old satellite dishes in your neighborhood. Back in my day, it was the height of sophistication to get satellite TV. TV from SPACE, people! No one could resist.

But now, at least in my neighborhood, every single house has at least one old dish hanging around, being ugly, doing nothing.

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But lo, there is a lot to unpack when it comes to extra-deep cabinets and the black holes of unknown clutter they harbor.

Readers chimed in with tons of ideas for using these spaces (the comment section of this newsletter is truly wonderful). I decided to combine these ideas with my own to create an ultimate guide for making use of long/deep spaces. Think: extra-deep cabinets, under-stairs storage, under-sink areas, crawlspaces, and weirdly shaped closets.

Without further ado, here we go!

1. Store a bunch of the same thing. Nothing can get lost when you know there’s only more of the same in the rear depths of the cabinet. Toilet paper is a fan favorite for this.

2. Store single large items. Reader sugge…

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Here’s the backstory: I have some good friends in Portland who bought an adorable Victorian a few years ago. Our kids play together, so I’m over there a lot.

One day they included me in an ongoing couples debate—you know the kind—about whether to add a powder room in a hallway area. They thought maybe they didn’t have space becuase they use that area as an entry landing zone.

I could see a solution to this quandry and was itching to show them. Luckily, they agreed to partner with me for 2 hours one day to make this vision a reality. Here’s how it went down, including the principles we applied.

Principle: One place for each type of thing

I noticed that this family had 4 different places they were putting coats, and 3 places for shoes. With my mantra of one place for each category guiding the way, it was clear how we could consolidate their entryway system and free up a lot of space.

We were able to consolidate shoes to just two spots: the entryway built-in bench for the dad and kid’s shoes, and the hallway closet for the mom’s shoes.

I’m a fan of each family member having a specific spot for their shoes, rather than a grab-bag for the whole family where everyone has to dig through each other’s shoes. Which leads me to the next principle…

Principle: Don’t let stuff block important items

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Analysis paralysis can stop us from even getting started. We ask ourselves:

• What’s the most important category to start with?

• …Or should I go room by room?

• How long will this take me?

• Should I make a big pile of things to sort, or just select the items I want to declutter?

• How will I figure out where to take all the things I need to get rid of?

I clearly love a solid gameplan. Indeed, that’s what I often do with clients in our virtual 1:1 sessions. It can be helpful to build a strategy and step by step plan before diving into a big organizing project. (If you’d like my help planning out your holiday organizing project, grab an hour with me!)

At the same time, if you find yourself endlessly swirling in the gameplan stage, I say skip it. Just start somewhere. If every…

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Then the unthinkable happened.

My husband ::gasp:: dropped the box.

The box became the seat of anarchy. Nails and screws mixed together, thumbtacks strewn about, wall anchors sprinkled about. A true horror show.

I lived with that for months. Technically, the box was perfectly usable. But every time I opened the box (why am I constantly in need of nails and screws? I do not know), instead of joy I experienced a pang of annoyance.

This week, I decided enough was enough. I finally did something about it.

I dumped out the whole box on the dining room table and sorted everything into piles, then put things back in discrete compartments.

It took maybe 10 minutes, but the effect will last so much longer. Peace, at last!

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I once sold a rental property that had been a furnished long-term rental. I needed to quickly clear out all the furniture and kitchen items before the new buyer moved in. So I asked friends and family if they wanted any of the furnishings.

Every single person, when walking through the house, asked “But don’t YOU want these things?”

It was hard to put into words succinctly why I didn’t, beyond “Absolutely not!”

Here I’ll work out a more complete answer.

This week’s post is part of a series I’m calling The True of Ownership. There are hidden costs in all kinds of ownership and we work to unpack that here. Read Part 1 about the true cost of luxury items.

Free things are seductive. People in my city love to leave free stuff on the street corners, and it can be hard to resist looking through what’s on offer.

Free! How can you beat that?

But I’ve learned from decades of falling for “free” that the cost hits you later, and it can be hefty. Here are some of the hidden costs of that free item you just scored:

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So here in a rapid-fire list are my favorite and most sustainable (in my experience) ways to document life. I hope readers will chime in to contribute their ideas in the comments — I am sure there are some great ideas out there from our thoughtful community.

On to the ideas!

1) Email accounts for each kid at birth

This one has had surprising staying power for me. I started a Gmail account for each kid when they were born, and I email funny stories and document milestones for each kid via email. Then when the kids are grown up, the idea is you give them access to the email account.

Tactically, it’s been really helpful to have a re…

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As we know by now, everything in your home needs its own mini-home. “Around here” isn’t specific enough. The 5S method, an engineering framework which is the foundation of everything we do here at Your House Machine, depends on it:

• Sort - get rid of unnecessary clutter

• Set - everything is in its place ← this is the step I’m talking about

• Shine - clean

• Standardize - you reset the space the same way each time

• Sustain - you run your reset regularly

If things don’t have a place, your house will struggle to operate smoothly. I’ve heard it said that clutter represents unmade decisions, and this feels true. Until you’ve found a place for each of your things, every time you tidy it becomes a problem solving exercise.

The mental work of solving this puzzle over and over is one of the biggest barriers to organizing. But sometimes it’s hard to figure out where the thing should live.

Here’s my trick for figuring out the best home for an item with minimal effort:

Do not ask yourself “Where should this live?” Don’t wonder where other people keep their thing. Don’t analyze what would be logical. Just imagine where your impulse would take you, without thinking too hard about it.

Some variations:

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A core principle of design I learned from the tech world is that good design has nothing extraneous. In elegant design, everything serves an essential function. I consider a well-designed house machine to be similar: nothing extraneous. I’m therefore always interested in rooting out the unnecessary and enjoying the simple elegance of a more efficient home. As always, I share my discoveries here for consideration, not as a mandate.

After my last treatise about why you don’t really need to buy kids toys, I feel like I’m on a bit of a rant roll about unnecessary purchases. Me right now:

So buckle up for another category of stuff you don’t really need to buy.

Here’s how I got here: I read the book Beyond Soap about 5 years ago. The author, a dermatologist, deconstructs what is going on with the skin problems and sensitivities that land people in her office. In most cases, she says, the problem is all the products people use on their skin. Stop using the products, and usually the problem clears up.

Score! My favorite kind of advice is the advice to do less.

She goes through all the reasons why modern skincare is generally overkill, and shares recommendations for the few science-backed products that actually help skin (there are only a few).

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Regular readers know I’ve managed a few big steps towards a simpler, smaller wardrobe:

• The 90/90 rule which let me cut through a lot of my sentimentality and wishful thinking about my wardrobe

• Getting rid of a huge dresser in our main bedroom, forcing my husband and me to ruthlessly edit our wardrobes to fit into one tiny shared closet

These steps forward were great, but there’s always the risk of backsliding and accruing random items again. I avoid this by thinking about supporting ever-lower levels of homeostasis in my closet. This homeostasis rule applies to anything in your home, not just clothes.

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But I know I’m not alone. I doubt anyone can live in this day and age without a drawer, basket, or shelf (or all of the above) for random cables.

Finally I’d had enough and I decided to organize this drawer, and I humbly suggest you consider doing the same. It’s a great weekend project: clear boundaries, not too time-intensive, and untangling those cords somehow psychically untangled my brain energy.

So let’s get rid of that cable rat’s nest! My suggested workflow:

1. Take everything out and make a big pile on a table or the floor

2. Relocate obvious things that don’t belong there (in my case a portable white noise machine and noise cancelling headphones that should live with kid stuff)

3. Group what’s left into piles of …

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And a reminder that I still offer 1:1 consultations if you need a buddy to problem solve your space with you. Yes! We! Can!

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Today we’ll navigate paths through this eco-guilt, which I recently learned is an offshoot of climate grief—a newly emerging mode we’ve discovered to feel bad all the time. (As though you needed another reason to go news sober!)

To be clear, this is not a newsletter about the human impact on climate change. My goal is to help you create a functional home in the face of anxiety about the environment. The truth is hanging onto stuff you don’t need is not going to help with climate change, and might be making your life worse. You can actually have a net positive impact by letting go!

Read on for 3 specific tactics that will help you get rid of the thin…

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One category I’ve seriously struggled to declutter is clothing. I do not buy many clothes, and yet I have gone through about 6 rounds of clothing edits in the past year alone, and I still have way more clothes than I actually wear.

It must be an emotional category for me — the memory of the person I was when I bought the thing (someone who left the house after dark, ever), the hopes I’d imbued in that garment (“maybe I’ll become artsy!”), the way I’d become used to seeing the same thing every time I opened the closet (“hello, jaunty peacock print dress!”), the pain of remembering how much I spent on something I never use (ouch!). Plus my body has morphed with childrearing, and I am never quite sure if it’s “done.” As though a body is ever done morphing. Maybe you relate.

Anyhow.

I finally got the kick in the butt I needed in an Apartment Therapy article featuring the “90/90 Method,” summed up as: Have you worn it in the past 90 days? Will you wear it in the next 90 days? If no and no, then it goes!

It’s hardcore and I love it.

The brilliance of 90/90 is it focuses on your behavior, not your feelings or your analysis about whether the item is worth keeping or not. Feelings and ideas are complex and ever changing. Behavior is black and white.

With this method my closet now looks like this:

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Is the suspense killing you?

First a brief origin story. Back when I was contemplating finishing our basement (Before & After and the full story here), I needed a game plan for where we’d put all the things that had till then lived in the basement. As will surprise no one, I feel strongly about being super intentional with what you store and how. I felt blocked in my problem solving and knew I wasn’t thinking as creatively as I could.

To get unblocked, I hired a professional organizer to come over for an hour and help me make a plan for how to distribute all the items from the basement into other spots throughout the house. Wow, was that money well spent. In less than an hour we had a full plan of action I was confident to execute.

💡 P.S. This is one reason…

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This is the first of an every-so-often series where we’ll explore an essential concept within systems thinking. We approach everything here at Your House Machine from a systems perspective, and internalizing these ideas will help you build your own systems instincts (what more could a girl want?).

The first we’ll discuss today is leverage. Let’s learn about leverage from this spry fellow:

A lever is a simple machine that lets you exert…

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It’s also a story about social media, consumerism, managing family relationships, sustainability, health and probably a lot more. In other words, when you spend most of your day at home with a toddler, you start reading a lot into an innocuous tin of green tea powder.

It all started with a quest to reduce my caffeine intake for, y’know, health. I’d been told matcha tea has less caffeine than coffee plus offers other healthful compounds. I figured, Ok great. I’ll drink that. But now to select which kind of matcha…

As soon as I had this thought, Instagram started blitzing me with ads for matcha tea (thanks, robot spies). I started hearing a lot from a brand called Pique. I do not mean to pick on this brand — their products are lovely — it’s really just a symbol of all the beautifully packaged stuff I fall for on Instagram.

Though if any brand has my number it’s this one. Nature! Artisans! Science! Orchids!

My mom had been drinking this stuff for ages, trendsetter that she is, and gave me some to try. It tasted good, so I went to their site to order more. And goodness, it cost $68 PER TIN. Which was 35 servings, but let’s be real, I definitely have at least 2 servings a day, so that’s not even a 3 week supply. So, I guess, matcha was going to be a large percent of my household budget now? It seemed inevitable.

I hit “order.” This did not feel great, I have to tell you.

I did notice my grocery store sold similar-looking tins for less than half the cost, but the marketing—the amazing marketing—made me question the quality of these tins. They looked suspect to me. No artisans! No science! And definitely no orchids. Reject.

Eventually I was shaken from my delusional state.

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3 steps to a life-changing kitchen reshuffle

I was helping a client organize her kitchen a few weeks ago, when a core truth emerged that has stayed with me ever since.

Her kitchen seemed totally fine on the surface — great, even. Beautifully designed, not cluttered, and everything had a home. But it was driving her nuts. She showed me how moving through the space frustrated her at every turn. Certain items were hard to reach, drawers didn’t glide open, and she was up and down on a step stool throughout the day.

Even when a space “looks good,” we have to consider the systems underneath. I realized that the main issue here was one of spatial prioritization.

In other words, the items she used most often were not in the most convenient places. This is a really common problem; when we move into a home, we put things away in Their Spot, and our brains often don’t ever question again whether that’s the best spot.

While this can seem inconsequential, think about how often you are in your kitchen each day. Little inefficiencies and annoyances add up, my friend!

When I took a hard look at my own home, I realized I shared this problem. For instance, we mostly stopped drinking alcohol over a year ago. And yet, until this week we still had this many alcohol-drinking vessels in a prime spot:

Similarly, I had been cursing my fate every single day when I made my morning tea and smoothie (#yuppie), because I had to navigate an impossible-to-navigate corner cabinet (see below). I mean, I’m glad the cabinet maker used all available space, but this cabinet extends really far to the left so things get lost back there all the time. The opening is so small you always have to move something to get to the thing you want. Which I’ll be the first to point out is a huge red flag that you have a problemo.

I decided to take my own advice and fix all these inefficiencies one morning. I left the skinny, deep cabinet to my husband, which he was happy to take over, and I moved my focus to a prime real estate cabinet.

Here’s what this cabinet looked like before. Notice 1.25 shelves dedicated to alcohol beverage glasses which are never used, a top shelf dedicated to storing a random piece of art I didn’t know where to put 4 years ago (“Let me just stick it here until I find a home…”), a Sick Box with cold remedies front and center like that’s not a depressing thing to see every day, and no cohesive theme.

Here’s what it took to optimize this situation:

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We all have thankless, annoying, daily tasks we dread. For some, it’s emptying the dishwasher. For others, it’s wiping down counters after the kids ate and made a mess for the 9th time today. Or restocking toilet paper in the bathroom when it’s low. Or folding laundry.

Whatever it is, you’re not alone. And I have a hack to help you get over these tasks and move on with your life.

I’ll use the kitchen as an example, since that’s the hardest working machine in your house.

Let’s do a little fun math to get warmed up. (Wait, doesn’t everyone find math relaxing?)

It takes X time to unload the dishwasher.

If you don’t unload it in the morning, then dishes pile up in the sink. Food dries on the dishes, cooking is harder, disarray grows. You feel dread creeping in the longer you look at this undone chore. The job of cleaning the kitchen grows and grows.

When you finally get this mess under control it takes Y time. Only now, the a…

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Giving and receiving are equally stressful to me. For me, receiving a gift is like suddenly receiving a little job: Here, now you own this thing. Come up with a plan for using it, storing it, and demonstrating adequate appreciation.

I’m not an asshole, I promise. I love the people in my life dearly, and I enjoy being thoughtful and demonstrating someone is important to me. Sometimes this even takes the form of giving objects. I’m an “acts of service” person, and helping someone meet their goals is my favorite thing. Sometimes that means surprising someone with an item they’ve been searching for (yes, a gift!). But that’s as far as I like to go into gifting territory.

I understand some people really do love giving gifts and get sad or frustrated if denied the chance to gift. I don’t begrudge p…

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