Other Any tips/advice for organising stuff in my room? [video update added]

I'm after tips for organising my room at home...
I've been given an ultimatum to get it sorted.

these are the things i need to be able to deal with. any tips?
practical advice, for example, links to stuff I can get/buy to help deal with these things?

when you get snail postal mail how do you deal with it.
most of what I get is junk, so I need to get rid of my personal info from it and dispose of it.
I end up just getting a pile in my room.

I also collect loads of electronics, thinking it will come in useful one day.
including an old computer that will work, but is never used due to having several other computers in the house doing everything.
How do you organise spare/unused computer parts and electronics?

I have loads of copies of .net magazines (www.netmag.co.uk) and need some way of storing them. they are a bit wider than standard shelving and plastic magazine storage.
I have this type of magazine storage, which they used to fit until they decided to change the dimensions.
http://www.staples.co.uk/ENG/Catalog/cat_class.asp?name=UK_CL_Magazine Files (Plastic)

What do you do with the box(es) that you buy something in.
I always end up thinking I'll keep the box(es), incase I need to send it back or get a replacement. etc, but they always take up so much space.

I have a long list on my mobile of stuff I mean to sell on eBay. is there an easy way of getting the process done easily and efficiently?

I'm thinking I should post a photo of my room, but it's too embarrassing, and you wouldn't see anything for all the stuff I have.
mayby I should start a "Post your room - the 'before you tidy it' " thread if it hasn't

 

I approve of this thread. Personally, I use shoeboxes.

With all the extra boxes I just throw them in a spare room. Under the bed seems quite a good place for them though.

Selling them here might be a good idea if you're prepared to reduce prices a tiny bit.

 

I tend to flatten all the boxes of things I buy, then they can be stored either in a garage, cupboard under the stairs or the loft? You can use masking or duck tape to hold the boxes flat, and also to hold them together.

A serviceable shredder can be had for £10-20 nowadays, if you get one you don't need to faff about removing your personal details from junk, you can just dump the whole thing in the shredder. A personal filing cabinet (like a filing cabinet drawer in a box) is a great tool for keeping the paperwork you need to hold on to organised.

Magazines I can't really help you with. I don't tend to keep magazines longer than a month.

Electronics you have to be pretty brutal with sometimes. I had a big clearout a while ago and got rid of a load of stuff I would never ever use, but didn't want to throw out. At the end of the day you have to ask yourself what is the likelihood of you needing any of that stuff, and weigh that against the cost of buying something which will do the same job should the need arise. By the sounds of it you've got plenty of working computers, so ditch the old graphics cards and NICs.

Make sure you post a donation thread for your old electronics, if any of it's worth an appreciable amount of course stick it on ebay or in the FS forums here, but there's always someone on here willing to come collect a near-worthless box of old hardware to play with, and it saves it from going to landfill, at least temporarily.

Good luck. Big room clearouts can be stressful but you will feel brilliant when it's done.
AH

 

I don't have another room to use, and under the bed, well there is no space, as the base is an integral drawer with bedding etc in it.
The boxes have polystyrene in them, and hence cannot be flattened.


anyone know how to de-oderise a room, without chemical smells?
I always get ill from any synthetic smells.

 

Missed this. If you use OS X, there's an excellent app called GarageSale which provides an efficient UI for creating eBay auctions - it links directly to your account, and comes with a ton of themes to make your auctions look professional. It's a great tool and well worth the £20 or so license fee.

AH

 

I use windows xp for all computers.

 

anyone recommend any storage solutions?

 

I throw old receipts in a shoe box, i have a junk drawer filled with random things, deodorant, cologne, yearbooks, wallet, small things for my pockets and useful trinkets such as pocket lights and whatnot... I have a corner beside my dresser where i store my shoeboxes (2 of them) along with spare binders for school, but you could easily stack magazines on each other with the label facing outward... Any chance you have a top shelf in your closet to chuck stuff on? I just threw all my pc boxes into a bigger box and put it on my top shelf in my closet, along with blankets and my school bag.... I have a night table that has 1 small drawer, than a open bottom so i can just stack stuff in that, a nice spacious desk works also. I've seen people store puzzles and large flat things between matresses on the bed, as they won't get damaged, and they'll stay flat and have some solid protection.

 

The trouble with the magazines, is that they are not of a standard size anymore
The shelving I have can't accommodate them

I can't fix annything to the walls due to them being so old, i cant get screws to stay in them. everything has to be free-standing.

I will post a quick video, even though I am embarrassed to do so.
[edit]
video:
www.richarddawson.co.uk/misc/my room.MOV

I've also converted it using media-convert.com / media-mobi.com
http://media-mobi.com/en/?play-wpqjf1k2ak04v57xlqmod8qjaokoyl6u
(click the link to play)

 

For medical reasons I am 'confined' to a room 5 meters x 10 meters for upwards of 18 hours a day. I will watch this closely. I sleep, eat, and mod in this space. Mine is currently an abomination. One of my New Years resolutions is to fix that.

john

 

1) Paper boxes
2) Cinder block
3) Planks
4) Sharpies

Offices usually have a surplus of paper boxes and will just flatten them and toss them. They stack very well and hold up to some abuse. Shelving for your collection of boxes is easily accomplished with cinder blocks and long narrow planks. It's the cheapest solution money can buy (or you can scavenge), it's modular, requires no tools to assemble, and holds up well under it's own weight. Then of course Sharpies for labeling your boxes. This should cover back issues of mags, random electronic parts, seasonal clothing, reference books, piles of paper that you'd rather not shred just yet, your CD collection (now that you have it ripped), and other things that don't get used much but you can't stand to get rid of. Be careful when you build these shelves, especially if they are on carpet. You'll want some wedges to put under the front so they lean slightly backwards towards the wall.

As for item boxes, I usually toss them unless I feel extraordinarily compelled to keep them. They all tend to be different shapes and sizes which means they don't play well with other boxes on shelves. This means less than optimal crap-package which means you can't keep as much merchandise and/or spare parts on hand.

A shredder has already been mentioned, though if you like bonfires and have space for them, personal mail goes up quickly and only requires a box (as mentioned above) to store until the appointed date.

 

When it comes to electronics, and stuff like magazines, random crap, I find that if I don't use it in a year, I won't use it at all. So throw it out.

 

you don't need it. throw it out.

more practical advice, get some of those little drawers and fill them up (i've got a tacklebox, but there's all sorts of suitable alternatives). fill a rubbermaid tub with crap that won't fit in little organizer drawers.

any papers, snailmail and stuff, scan what's important and bin it all.

magazines sound like they should probably go in the trash too. i hate magazines, the only place they should exist is in the waiting room of doctors offices, and even then the doctors should really gets some wifi.

 

With old hardware you can always donate it to people if it has gone past the point of reclaiming any value from it and the for sale section here is an ideal place to do it, or alternatively a charity shop may take it off your hands.
Re-cycle any old paperwork that you don't need, and that of it that you no longer need that has identifying details (Addresses etc) on it should be shredded.

For the random bits I keep but use only once in a while I have a series of stacking draw box type things.
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/8753799/Trail/searchtext>DRAW+BOX.htm

Sure they don't look so nice, they are unstable, and over all pretty crappy however they fit well at the end of a desk or in a small corner due to their diminutive size and I've used a label printer to label up exactly what is in each draw.

As for filing needed paperwork, the other half does that with a series of box and lever arch files each with labels down the spine dictating what is in each (printed from the label printer)

With the boxes stuff comes in, it gets stored for about a year (or as long as the warranty is) or as long as I have the hardware and am likely to sell it .

Of course if you don't use them for storage as ArtificialHero suggested, flattening them may be a good idea so as to save space, just means re-constructing them should you ever need but that's something that is easily done with a roll of Gaffer tape (is there anything that stuff CANT fix?).


At the end of the day though it's down to how large your room is, how much of it you REALLY want to/should keep and how much you are willing to invest in purchasing storage systems, shredders and the like if you can't borrow or otherwise obtain these objects through the generosity of others.

 

Because you have so much stuff in your room, you should completely empty your room (except large furniture of course) and then sort through it all and toss out the stuff you dont need. It's way harder to sort through things when its all over the place. Empty all your shelved and your floor of everything into a hall way or whatever then go through it and only bring what you want to keep back into your room. Then organize it onto shelves or in cardboard boxes.

You seem to have a nice size room and are very lucky for that. Mine is quite small. I've got a closet, shelved built into the wall (was a closet in the other room but we closed that side and opened this side), dresser, a desk that I made in the shape of an L and its about 80"x90", and my chair and two stools. No room for anything else really.

When I built my current PC I had tons of stuff in my room and on my desk from working on it and such. I have since finished and have cleaned my room up. I put in a shelf in my desk so now it is much cleaner and organized. For all the boxes from PC parts, when I ordered my parts it came in a very large cardboard box so I have all my PC parts and such in that box and its in my closet. For the boxes my hardware came in, I have kept most of it as I have used to boxes to put other parts in but small things I threw out the boxes as I dont need them.

One of my stools opens up to store stuff in so I've got a ton of electronic bits in there like cables and manuals, old PS2 games and such.

For papers I need to keep I have zippered binder that I put it all into.

For papers you can throw out, get a paper shredder and bring it to recycling.

Do you really need the magazines? Maybe some of them you might want to keep but I doubt you really need to keep them all?

Use your shelf space wisely and organize it neatly instead of tossing things onto a shelf. Add extra shelves if you are out of space. Get containers with lids to put stuff into and stack them

Most importantly throw out what you dont need. If you want to keep it for the future, think this: Are you ever going to actually get around to fixing it or whatever? Most of the time it is NO. So toss it.

 

Great topic... I tend to hoard a bunch of crap on the idea of "someday this will be useful"
I've done a bit of tossing, but still have a bunch of crap, and am far from organized.
Check out Lifehacker.com for great organziation tips
No idea on scent free odor removal (baking soda?)

 

what on lifehacker are you referring to?
I have only found (what I find useful) is a link to www.realsimple.com

 

If you're planning to rearrange the furniture in your room (which is often a good way to find extra space) test it with sketchup first. I've been doing this for years now, in many different rooms, it doesn't take long to make scale model of the room and furniture, and then you can find the optimum layout with out all the effort.

It's ridiculously geeky, but it works

 

As far as odours go, take everything out of the room and clean the carpets, walls, ceilings etc... wash the curtains. If you've been sleeping on that mattress without a sheet for more than a matter of weeks then that will smell aswell, put a plastic sheet over it or replace it and use a sheet next time. Wash your bedding. When you put everything back into the room clean it as you go. Open the windows and doors for a few days.

Halfords have some car air fresheners in stock at the moment that look like jelly beans. They actually smell like fruit, rather than smelling like an air freshener that smells like fruit, does that make sense? They're about £2 iirc.

 

I don't know if it's visible in the video, but I've got some inch thick plywood for making a new desk.
the main top of it is standing against the wall of the closed chimney, between my bed and the chimney.
It is was cut (at my local B&Q warehouse) to fit and be wider than my existing desk, and also it is longer so it will go from the pair of black metal shelves right up to where the door opens, thus replacing my existing desk completely.

The rest of the plywood sheet has been cut to make some desk speaker stands, which will have a top and bottom linked by small plastic 20mm diameter pipe, and threaded rod. through to fix them together.

I have in the past over time, collected quite a few of these storage boxes:
http://www.reallyusefulproducts.co.uk/uk/

my dad's brother will have my old printer (Once I have confirmed it is working)

I have now got some card boxes from the supermarket. and since I'm not allowed to put anything outside my room.
I have sort of come up with this idea, not as a storage solution, but how to deal with the mass amount of stuff.

put the boxes on my bed, and collect stuff in one or two that needs sorting. (piles of paper/ mail/ magazines/ etc.)

have another two empty ones, for sorting.
go through the piles, putting stuff to keep in one and stuff for getting rid into another.
then take the box with stuff to keep, and put the contents in all their separate storage places in the room.