As a professional organizer, one of the main reasons people hire me is because they don’t know how or where to store their things. Where should I store the Christmas decorations? they ask. Where do I store the extra school supplies or all of the winter gear? So a big part of my job consists of finding homes for people’s things within their house.
To do this, I often rely on what I call “the Fred Meyer method.” (For you non-Oregon readers, Fred Meyer is a chain of grocery and home goods stores here in the Pacific Northwest.) It goes like this:
When you walk through a Fred Meyer store, you will notice that the store is divided up into departments. Food, clothing, garden, toys, etc. Then within each department, each item has a “home,” that is, its own particular spot on a shelf or rack. And this is where that item can always be found. For example, bananas are always, always found in the produce department in its own display. I will never find bananas in another department or even in another home within produce, like in the chilled section. Nope, I can always count on finding them in the same place. This makes it super easy to find the bananas each and every time.
You can set up your house the same way. You can ask yourself, where should the Christmas decorations “department” be within my house? Where should the “extra school supplies” department be? If you aren’t sure where the item should go, ask yourself, if I were to buy this item at Fred Meyer, what department would I find it in? What other items would be near it?
It’s a neat trick for making those old organizing adages, “store like with like” and a “place for everything and everything in its place” come to fruition for you. And one of the benefits of using the Fred Meyer method is that when you get new things in your house, you can know instantly where they would go.
Try it out and let me know how it works!
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