Savannah Lee

Here's part 1.

Here's part 2.

Here's part 3.

Besides the difficulty involved in “organizing” your house, there's its essential futility in my opinion.

Why do I think it's futile?

It attempts to impose order on use-patterns that are actually illusory because they arise out of the lack of pattern. Take my underwear on the bathroom floor. Most of my underwear gets dropped on the bathroom floor. Not all of it. See the problem? How many bins am I going to have to install to keep up with where I might happen to undress next?

My daughter's art supplies are another good example. They're all over the damn place, because it never occurred to me--it would have seemed so limiting and preposterous, and in a way, of course, it is--to tell her that she can only draw in one area of the house. What!? Like...if you want to draw, you have to go to your desk? What the hell!

If you think that way (as I do), then possibly you like kittening for the Lord of the Seven Darks in a domestic context. In which case, rock the hell on, my brother or sister. You reject both organizing and housekeeping, and great. You'll be throwing lots of blankets over lumps of clutter on the couch whenever a maintenance guy has to come over, but--great. As long as you wash the forks you fish out of the sink before you eat with them, great.

But we're talking about the pitfalls of organizing here. So: your daughter draws in her bed, sometimes at her desk, sometimes on the couch, sometimes in the kitchen, etcetera. How do you "organize," i.e. space-control, the resulting piles of crayons and markers and paper everywhere?

Well, you have to scope out those three or four places that she likes to draw the most often, and create storage there to accommodate her.

And then watch as she discovers a fifth. Because she will. Because organizing follows and enshrines chaos, and chaos, as we have discussed, is chaos. It is master.

Hence organizers tell you right up front that you're going to have to keep adjusting and developing your systems as you go. Constant re-thinking, constant redeployment. Why? In my opinion, it's because you're on the "wrong" axis.

The alternative to chaos in the domestic setting is process. Aka, yes, draw at your desk. GO to your PLACE when it's TIME.

Cheryl Mendelson's housekeeping book (which, as you may recall, started this whole thing for me) is therefore entirely about process.

That's why she tells us how to fold the washrag after we do the dishes. That is what makes this book seem exotic, bizarre, and even anal and crazy to some people. We freak out at the idea of someone controlling where, when and how we do things in our home, because we don't understand the concept of process and what it can do.

This lack of understanding has been surprisingly far-reaching, even influencing, I would argue, our architecture.

That's for tomorrow.