Sort, Inventory, Purge and Store | Hour 3

you over the years. Here. I think I was somebody sent me to some podcast server the other day and I was looking at home. They said, oh, you check it out there, look at it there. It's there as well. I mean, we know it's everywhere. It's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, anywhere you listen to your favorite podcast. You can find us there. But I think it literally listed at the top of this one podcast server. Thirteen hundred episodes have we done? Thirteen hundred episode we probably have. That makes

sense anyway, home improvement reference library waiting for you there. Also, if you're thinking, hey, that's all great, Dean, what we really need is you and Tina in our house. You can do that too. You can book an in home design consult with me and Tea just go to house whisper dot Design. It is our way of trying to help more people than we can do just with signing up for long term design work. It's the consults that we do. They're always special. We come to your home,

help get you pointed in the right direction. Quite often it makes all the difference in the world. So it's just something that we love doing and we can do relatively easily as opposed to getting a long waiting list for a full design. So house whisper a dot Design is where you find that. All right, let's dive back into the subject of organization and my own little system, which I've very adorably called SIPs SIPs which stands for Sort, Inventory, Purge and Store. This is not the end all of

organizational systems. No, I'm not going to write a book about it. It is just something that actually came to me as I was processing through how I help our own clients with their organizational issues. I realized that these are the four steps that I go through and it happens to spell the word SIPs. And what I thought was cute about it is that or interesting or both.

Is the fact that organization it's all ahead game. It's all about our head and our heart fighting with each other over things that are meaningful and things that we don't want to let go of and things that we don't want to edit harshly out of our lives or out of our homes. And that's why we all end up holding onto more stuff than we should. Let's face it, it's all in our head. It truly is our head in our heart. And so this process of sorting and inventory,

purging and storing, it's SIPs. It's a way to kind of help get around your heart issues on a thing. So you're taking a little sip of a thing, and you don't have to be intimidated by, you know, guzzling it all down at once like a fire hose. So I got to I got through sorting, which is the most critical step. It's also the easiest. We're not deciding to keep anything or get rid of anything, or how to store a thing. We're just making piles. I use

the example of socks. There's really no way of really getting an emotional sense of how many socks you have until they're all in a pile together and then you inventory them. Step two, you sort and then you inventory how many socks do we have? We have forty seven pairs of socks and about nineteen unmatched singles. Well, those are gone, right, and then the forty seven pairs that

are left. It allow you, once you've sorted something into that small of a category, it allows you to be more rational about this and say, I only have two feet. There are only seven days in a week. If I wore three pairs of socks every day all week long for an entire week, okay, that's only twenty one pairs of socks. And that's if I don't do laundry during the course of the week. So twenty one is not

forty seven. And that allows us some real emotional impetus to make some cuts, right, to make some cuts, to reduce down to what's really really necessary. And by the way, I'm not talking about you having some spartan life in which you know, there's just there's your home, and there's a stool in the corner and a you know, in a hair shirt over there that you put on to punish yourself, an itchy shirt, one piece of clothing. That's

not at all what we're talking about. What we're talking about is max the storytelling capacity of your home by editing things down and just dealing with a problem that we all deal with, which is too much stuff. Even those who are economically challenged among us the most still probably have too much stuff. Just something that happens to us. So we have sorted, we have inventoried. Now comes the time to purge, right, And that is what I'm talking about.

When I say do I need forty seven pairs of stock socks, It's time to toss those out.

approach this as rationally as possible. From the other two steps they're sorting in the inventory, so you can actually get some emotional and mental perspective around just how much stuff you've got versus how much you need, and then we want to let it go. And we don't mean throwing it away. Most of the things that you've got that you're tempted to hang on to are going to be things that other people could use as well, and

so pass it on, share the love. As our earlier caller suggested as well, there's the Salvation Army, there's Goodwill, there's the Rescue Mission. There are places that will come and pick up your stuff. There are places you can take it too. They take everything from clothing to furniture

to everything, everything, everything, everything. The fact of the matter is there are others who could use it, and if that becomes an emotional point of leverage for you, allow that to be the fact that this thing's life doesn't end with you, but it moves on and it can find a new life and new memories with new people. The point is this, there are things you want to hold on to, things that aren't going to necessarily be sitting in your house on display. Memorabilia nostalgia keepsakes. Nothing

wrong with that. The only thing about keepsakes that become problematic is when an entire garage and a rented storage area and five other rooms in your house are all full of them, because at this point they aren't serving you. Keepsakes should be sorted in such a way that you can go and sit down for a little bit of time you want to and revisit them. Not everything in your life, not every moment in your life, not every greeting card you ever received, not everything anybody has ever

given you. No life, no human life, can afford to hang on to its memorabilia and become the Smithsonian Institute for your life. It's just not feasible, And believe me, it is a far greater burden. Allow memory to serve its function. And ideally, memorabilia are things that set off memories, not having to relive every single moment, every single detail, but things that set off the best memories for you along the way. Those are the things that are worthy

of keepsakes. And then we purge the rest, We purge, we let it go. Now we finally come to the question of storage, because when we've done our of sorting and inventory and purging, we've got stuff left and the question is what do we do. How do we handle the stuff that's left well, that finally comes to storage, storage now me be really clear. Storage comes in two forms. In fact, I'm so hesitant to even say this in

the same sentence, but I'm gonna say it anyway. When it comes to closets inside your house, that's not storage, not storage at all, but I'm gonna just put it in this term, right. Storage comes in two forms, staging and long term storage. Now what's the difference. Okay, Well, technically, I guess everything that's in your home, inside a cupboard, inside a cabinet, inside a chest of drawers, or furniture or whatever, is storage. But I would rather you think

of it in terms of staging. What's in your house is ideally best described as staging. What is staging. Staging is what furniture and closets are for. It is a resting place, a short term storage place for frequently used items to be able to access them. Okay, like your sock drawer. Okay, not with forty seven pairs of socks in it, but a few pair of socks, and it's there for you to get to and get at because you go to it every single day. It's that kind

of thing. Staging. Staging is different than long term storage. Long term storage are simply the things that have to be stored away somewhere that are important but aren't going to get used every week or every month or looked at every other day. You know what I'm talking about. So I'm very serious about this, and I really push my clients to the point of them usually being very annoyed with me. But I'm very serious about it. Closets in your home if you are using them as they

should be used in a home. And I'm a home designer, so I know all about what closets are for. They are places where we stage things. Stage the clothing that you actually wear, Stage the shoes and the socks, and the hanging items that you actually realistically go to, stage the stuff, the sports gear or the whatever that you actually use on a regular basis. Closets are short term staging areas staging long term storage. That's for the garage or for the storage shed, or for wherever else you've

got a room to do that kind of stuff. Long term storage, it's about crates, it's about shelving, it's about organization and so on. In the garage. By the way, the workbench staging the area above the workbench staging. Okay, peg board or slat boards up there so that we can put in little hooks and fixtures to hold tools, to organize the screwdriver set, to keep things organized and clean and clear so you can get to it when you need it and hang it up out of the

way when you don't need it. That is staging. Long term storage is stuff that you know you still own, but you don't have to see it or you're not going to deal with it. And that's the kind of stuff that we want to get as clean and clear

as possible and up and out of the way. Long term storage the one area that is just kind of the hybrid between long term and store storage and staging would be like holiday decorations, the stuff that comes out seasonally because you know it's going to sit there for six plus months at a time, let's just call it seasonal. If it's seasonal, it's gonna sit there in long term storage for about nine months and then you need to access it and then you use it and then it

goes away again. But other things are on long term storage that aren't seasonal, they're just long term storage. Okay, So here are the clues about that. We want to keep things off the floor as much as possible so they're not in the way. But there are so many options when it comes to long term storage these days. I just walked through the aisles of my local home depot. It's a couple three days ago, and I thought, you know, I'm going over and see what's going on with the

crates and everything. Man, every time I look there, there are more and more storage ideas. Heavy duty storage racks that hold crates in a way that they slide out and are easily accessible. Crates are being built better and better with stronger lids and longer sidewalls so that crates can be stacked and nested on one on another and stand five six seven crates tall, only taking up a relatively small area labeling the front of them so you know what's in each one. There are so many ideas.

I'm going to share a few more with you, But first.

and all of it. And we've come to this place now where we've gone through the sorting and the inventory and the purging. I hope, I hope we've got enough purged that we're in the storage mode. And I shared with you before the break that storage in a home comes in two forms, long term and staging. Closets in

your home, furniture in your home, staging, staging. I guarantee you, as hard as that may be to embrace, if you set that as an inviolable rule for yourself that inside your home furniture and closets are for staging items that are frequently used, you will never live to regret it. Never live to regret it. Okay, you don't need more closet space most of you. You just need less stuff and to get a little bit more organized along the way. It doesn't apply to everybody. I get it, I get it.

Don't write me emails about you don't know how small my closet. I get it, especially if you live in an older home, like a pre World War Two era home. I know, hardly any storage whatsoever. But what's interesting. You know what's interesting about pre World War two homes. They reflect a very very different lifestyle, a very very different

economic strata. Homes built before World War Two, built in the twenties and the thirties, which there are a lot of them in every town, including here in southern California, people just did not have as much stuff, and yet they seem to be living perfectly, healthy and happy lives. It's a different way of looking at the world. Material possessions were on a different scale back then. That's why there aren't that big of a closet in the primary bedroom.

That's why there isn't as much storage. There just wasn't as much stuff. Some to think about, That's all I'm saying. It's something to think about when it comes to storage for the garage. There are so many innovations these days that are available heavy duty overhead racks. If you have a dry walled garage, or even if you don't, if you've got a well supported garage ceiling above you, you could take advantage of these overhead racks. They're built to work

around the garage door opener. Both sides of the garage door opener take advantage of that area up there. They're relatively easily accessible. Some of them are incredibly accessible. Some of them. If you've got the budget for this, you can get a garage hoist, a motorized hoist that literally will lower that stuff down to the floor of the garage. You pull the car out, lower that down, get whatever you need out of there. It's a good place to store seasonal things, and then right up it goes back

up to the ceiling again out of your way. It's a tricky thing garage ceilings, because most garage ceilings still have a traditional garage door opener that kind of cuts off the whole midpoint of the garage. For some of you, getting rid of that garage door opener is actually the first step in getting better organized in your garage. And you're like, Dan, it's a garage door opener. I said,

I know. Here's the thing. The traditional garage door opener that sits up on the ceiling and breaks up the whole ceiling access up there can be replaced with a modern garage door opener that is direct drive and actually mounts on the wall next to the garage door. Nothing

out in the middle. Now you still have the tracks running back there, okay, but you don't have the big opener in the center, and so you can get three sections of storage going on in your garage instead of just two or even less because you've got the opener and the tracks to negotiate around. So that's something that you should look into. A door wreck drive wall mounted garage door opener bringing up the entire center space in

between the tracks of that sectional garage door. In addition to that, I already mentioned slat boards or peg board. There's still nothing wrong with peg board. Honestly the least expensive way to organize tools and stuff out in your garage up above your workshop cabinets. Still nothing beats peg board in economy and effectiveness at the same time, plus stackable crates and again things that are staged, things like tools that you use in your household all the time.

Let's say you don't have a workbench, then bucket organizers five gallon four dollars buckets from the big box store with a good bucket organizer put inside one for gardening, one for household tools, one for miscellaneous materials for a project that you might be doing. Bucket organizers are a brilliant way of getting things out of your way and not losing track of them. All right, let's go back inside the house now. Okay, let's talk about those closets

we've purged. Now we've got stuff, and we want to keep closets going in the best way possible. Closet systems inside your closet. The oldest and most traditional closet system is what we call in the industry shelf and pole, shelf and pole, and that is a closet rod with a twelve inch shelf sitting above it, mounted to brackets. Maybe the brackets are wood in old school shelf and pole. Maybe they're metal brackets with a little cup on the end that holds a little shelf or a platform that

holds the pole along there. There's absolutely nothing wrong with good old shelf and pole. It's the least expensive in some ways, it's the most durable. Okay. The only thing is if you're installing more of it yourself, you need to make sure that a secure ledger on the back that's holding up the shelf actually gets screwed into the studs, not just the dry wall in between the studs. That's a sure path to disaster when it comes to shelf and pole. Okay, so we want a ledger and we

want to hit the studs. So a little stud finder and you can put in your own shelf and pole really easily. Here is the thing. Though, I'm not a big fan of pre built organizers. I find most of them are kind of particle boardy and cheap and flimsy. I am a huge fan of top hanging closet systems. Okay, top hanging closet systems. You can find them at place well, you can find the most advanced forms of them at a place like the Container Store, the Alpha system. You

can also find them at Ikea. You can find them at home Depot and lows in the shelving aisles. They're kind of open wired shell coded wired shelves there. But top hanging systems are brilliant. And what is that. It's a system in which there is a hooked rail that mounts all the way up against the ceiling and you put several screws into it. And you know why, you can do that easily all the way at the ceiling, because that is where the top plate of your wall is.

That's nothing but solid wood up there, left or right. You don't have to find studs, it's all going to hit wood. You can literally put a bunch of screws into that top rail up there, and at that point it can hold literally hold thousands of pounds. And then with that rail come these hanging stanchions that hang down that have slots in them for shelves and or accessories. They just clip on and they hang down on the wall. All of their weight is being supported by the top

plate of the wall. And these stanchions coming down, they can slide left and right, they can go wider, they can go closer together. You can put a ton of different accessories. You can have single hanging, double hanging shoe racks, all sorts of stuff going on them. It is a great system. And the thing I love about it is that it's a modular system, meaning, you know, closets, in my opinion, should be allowed to evolve, just like people's lives evolved, just like like the home evolves, and you

go through different phases of time. Right, there's a time when you need that long hanging for those formal suits and the addresses, and there are other times when you're like, you know what, I'm way past that now. I'm not even wearing suits anymore. I'm not wearing We don't need the dresses. We only need a very small space. I'd love to reorganize my closet. So the one downside of shelf and poll or fixed fancy cabinets inside a closet, as nice as they are, is that they don't have

a lot of flexibility. But these top hanging modular systems, we can simply get all the clothes out of there, slide some things around, take double hanging, turn it into single or single hanging, and turn it into double. We can add storage shells, we can add shoe racks, we can redesign the closet with the existing materials, and maybe just adding another shelf for two and one more trip to the store and another couple of accessories, and you

reconfigure the closet for your current needs. There is just a lot of wisdom in having a closet system that's strong, that's efficient and modular, and that can change with your changing needs. And if it all comes down to well, that's all well, and goodeing. But I want a really nice, fancy walking closet system. That's fine. I would suggest this. You can call a place like California Closets. By the way, as far as the closet places are concerned, they're not

the sponsor of the show. But I'm going to give you this endorsement. Those guys know how to do it well, and I find the quality kind of what works well with the pricing. But if you're going to get overly fancy inside a closet, just get your cabinet guy involved. Just bypass the typical closet stores and closet service people because you will find that they are charging inordinately large prices and putting in materials that you wouldn't even put

in in your kitchen. And So, if you want a quality cabinet built into your closet the way and you want it to hold up the way your kitchen cabinets hold up, and guess what, call the kitchen cabinet company and have them work up a closet design for you and get that built in. You will not regret it.

them all. I also want to remind you that the House Whisper podcast is everywhere your favorite podcasts are found. Jason Bateman loves our podcast. That's what he told me at the Dodger game last night. That's what I imagined him telling me if he had actually talked to me instead of just eating all those peanuts and two hot dogs right in front of it. Three hot dogs right in front of me. Tina's like three, there were three. Tina was not that Tina was counting, but she was

counting how many hot dogs? Jason Bateman atee at the Dodger game anyway. Nevertheless, the house Whisper podcast is everywhere your favorite podcasts are found, of course on the free iHeartRadio app, but also Apple podcasts, Spotify. Anywhere you listen to your podcast, you can find us. Just search for home with Dean Sharp or Dean Sharp or the house Whisper or you know any name. Just put in any name and you'll come up with the house Whisper Podcast maybe.

And if your home is in need of some personal house Whisperer attention, remember that you can book an in home design consult with us at house Whisper dot Design. Just go there for more information. So wrapping up our thoughts on storage and organization today, I've taken you through the steps that I've kind of developed over the years that inadvertently ended up spelling the word SIPs. Is that a word? What I get an actual scrabble score for SIPs? I guess it's plural of sip, right, more than one

sip is SIPs. But that stands for sort, inventory, purge, and store. And the reason I've taken you through those steps is because you know we, as we've said, storage and getting rid of stuff and thinning out stuff in our home. It's all it's all ahead game. It's all about your head and your heart holding on to things, and we all need to do a better job. I think of letting go of those things, not letting go

of nostalgia or memory or anything like that. But you know you're coming to a home designer and you're asking him whether or not you know something should be removed from a room, or whether the amount of things in a room should be lessened. You're going to get a lecture on telling a story in that room, and you're going to get my lecture on making focal points, not having too much stuff distracting you from the story and

the vibe that you want that room telling you. And unless the story that you're trying to tell is confusion and clutter, it's time to probably do some editing and get rid of some things along the way. Sorting non judgmentally without having to commit to throwing anything away is the first most important step, and it gets you to that place where you've sorted things. Now you can inventory them, and when you're looking at isolated categories like how many

T shirts do I actually own? How many socks do I have? How many files of this or that of medical records from when I was twelve or when the kids you know were years and years younger. How much of this do we need to keep? That is when when you see the piles of it just in one category, it gives you emotional leverage over that and it allows you to get rid of some stuff and to clear it out. And then when it comes to storage, just remember staging is for inside the house, closets and furniture.

Staging it means short term storage or frequently used items. Long term stuff. Get that out of the house, get in another area, get it well organized in the garage or a storage or area, or whatever the case may be. Long term stuff. Treat it differently than staging along the way, and you will have a happier, lighter life. And by the way, once you get all this set up, the ongoing discipline is simply this. You're going to run into things. Tina and I run into things every time we take

a trip. We're like, oh my gosh, I love that. Let's bring it home and put it on display in our home. We do it even now. The difference is knowing that our room, most of the rooms in our house are full of the story that we're telling. So bringing that home means that it's going to get exchanged for something else that's already there because we don't just keep adding to and adding to and adding to and adding to. Okay, it just they can have their place.

And if you decide to rotate seasonally the story of a room, fine with that too, just put it in rotation.

It's like, you know what, I can't have this, that and the other thing all here at once, but I can do it every three months or every six months, and everybody gets their shot at being on display in the room, just like a Just like an art gallery or a museum will have, you know, exhibits, roving exhibits that well, this exhibit will be on display for the next three months, and don't miss out because then it

goes away for another year. These are all just methods and techniques for doing this kind of thing, all right. I hope I have helped you through at least a couple of speed bumps along the way there and get you started in a good sense, all right. True confession, I don't really have any brilliant Father's Day thoughts for you today, but I'm going to be as transparent with you as I can be here because it is Father's Day. Here's my transparent confession. I woke up this morning really

missing my dad. I lost him thirty years ago, and the more I thought about that this morning, the more I realized that I'm now the only person alive on this planet who really knew him and who knew us as father and son together. I'm the only one left who holds those truths. He's still here with me because I have my stories and my albeit imperfect memories. But it made me sad to think that when I'm gone, he will be gone too. And that's sad because he mattered.

He wasn't famous or wealthy, or legendary or anything that anybody else would think of being memorable. But he was my dad, and he mattered. I wish I knew him better. I wish he'd been around to see who I've become. He left this world just when I was starting to become something as an adult. I wish he'd been around to help me through a lot of the things that I've been through, instead of me always having to just guess my way through what it means to be a good man and a good person. I hope he would

be proud. Mostly I just wish he was around. I still feel him in things like tools and pocket knives, fishing tackle, things that creep on creep up on me unexpectedly, and suddenly he's there with me again, doing something like when I was a kid. So that's all I got for you today. I'm just gonna say this, This is my dad. And if your dad is still around, just know, with all his frailties and his faltering and his imperfections, he matters. And so find him, give him a hug

and let him know that he matters. And that's it. And I hope that that's something that you can do and that it's not too difficult, because I have a feeling doing those kinds of things are the way that we continue, day by day to build ourselves a beautiful one. And so very very happy Father's Day to all of you today, have a great week. We'll see you right back here next weekend. This has been Home with Dean

Sharp the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the Iheartrate dioapp