Have You Seen My...?
maybe try the floor?!?
From a recent text with W, age 16:
H: Found in the dryer. Maybe consider emptying your pockets before you put pants in the laundry basket?
W: Oops
W: Now you have something to blog about tho
H: lol, you know me too well
W: wc loved your message
Thank you for the writing prompt, son. Should it inspire an essay about why it isn’t necessary to wash candy and snack wrappers before throwing them out? Or about the amount of junk in teenagers’ diets in 2024? No, instead I am compelled to write about our complicated storage system, the gist of which is that the best place to find something in the Chong house is: anywhere other than where you might expect it. This happens because: a) we forgot to put something back; and/or b) we chose an odd place for an item’s home to begin with. Perhaps we are bad at organizing things, or our 1950s-built home has insufficient storage, or we just have too much of too many things. Clearly it is all three. Afterall, we do qualify for a sizable cash refund at Costco most years.
We forgot to put something back. Forgot may be a generous word here. There are many things in strange places at our house because the user didn’t put the item back. This is problematic because once something is left longer than a few hours, it tends to grow roots and stick to its spot for a few weeks or months.
M, age 13 decided to change the décor in her room so she took down the “pink aesthetic” patterns she’d printed and framed during the pandemic. She set the frames on the bar in our family room presumably for them to be “processed” (i.e. for someone else to figure out where they go). Unfortunately, there are no such processors at our home. As such, we might soon be able to count the time the frames have spent on the bar in years, rather than in months.
I sometimes play solitaire while I watch TV. The cabinet below the TV contains most of our games, including a box full of card decks. So why do I set my deck on top of the cabinet rather than inside it? I guess it’s like K keeping the peanut butter jar on the kitchen counter. It’s just a little quicker to get to when you don’t have to open a cabinet. At least K uses peanut butter every day when he makes W’s lunch. I can’t even claim that the cards are out due to frequency of use...
W dressed as Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon for Halloween. The costume included a faux fur vest (in ladies size XL) from Amazon, which has been draped across the back of his chair for the 18 days since Halloween. This weekend I asked what he plans to do with the vest, and he said, “keep it.” I feel fairly certain that if I check back in 18 days, weeks, or months, it will still be slung over the chair.
I am starting to understand why my dad began tying his stapler to his desk when I was a teen. If I walked off with it, the stapler wasn’t going to find its way back onto the desk by the next time he needed to staple something!
We are bad at organizing things. People have an idea about the intended purpose for certain cabinets or closets. Context clues, like the name of the storage area (linen cabinet, coat closet) help us formulate these ideas. At our house though, the clue might just send you astray.
Linen cabinet: you wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to guess that there are linens in our linen cabinet, but it is also where K keeps his casual clothing (t-shirts, sweatpants, etc.) because it doesn’t fit in his drawers or closet.
Coat closet: while we have taken to keeping a couple of raincoats in the closet by the front door, most of our coats & jackets are in the hallway closet leading to the home office at the back of our house. The coat closet is where we keep our vacuum cleaner.
Garage: assuming you have no expectation of finding any cars there, then you may not be too far off about what is in our garage. Exercise equipment, tools, Christmas tree, old Lego sets, emergency rations (aka “bucket food”), and slime-making supplies. Check.
Laundry room shelves: you will definitely find the detergent and dryer sheets on these shelves. But there are also expired COVID tests, surgical masks, extra hand soap, and of course bubbles.
Laundry-Related Products, but also Masks + Bubbles
Insufficient Storage/Too Much Stuff. I could say that we don’t care about material things in our family. But I would be lying. We like to shop. We love to find bargains. Unfortunately, the post World War II era home builders in Sherman Oaks did not plan for us to buy 32 rolls of toilet paper at once. Or 32 of anything else.
Shoes: we put a shoe rack in the front room to collect the kicks that were sliding off of Chong feet every time we entered the house. We have settled on a horseshoes-like standard (“close only counts in horseshoes & hand grenades”), where shoes in the general vicinity of the rack are tolerable. Shoes in the kitchen, dining room, or bathroom are just wrong. How rude!
Books: in 2018 we remodeled our family room, swapping out a gigantic non-functioning fireplace for a built-in entertainment wall with bookshelves. Now that those are filled, the back-up spot is a tall tower on the nightstand of the primary reader in the family.
Dresses: when the primary reader in the family is also an avid sample sale shopper, she ends up with more dresses than someone who rarely wears dresses needs. We did a closet remodel for our master bedroom in 2022. To optimize the space in my closet, I chose not to include any full-length sections. So I can’t hang a dress in my room even if I wanted to. Where to put them? In the gigantic walk-in closet in the office, of course!
Sleeping Bags: we have put our sleeping bags in a spot that no one will check. To keep these precious down bags safe from thieves or snuggly doggies, the cabinets above M’s closet are the perfect hiding spot. Who is least likely to go camping? Let’s put the sleeping bags in a six foot high cabinet in her room.
Ok, I admit it. My home is a little chaotic. It is challenging to simultaneously itch to put things in order while also being weighed down by inertia telling me to leave everything exactly where it is.
I recently “hosted” a singles meet-up for all of the unpaired socks in our house, prompted by too many strays in my drawer. The idea was to get everyone back with their partners and into the right dressers. At the end, K was worried we would find a few more singles (which we did), so he didn’t want me to throw the solos away immediately. We left them in the basket for a few days.
While doing some tidying last week, K needed the laundry basket so he dealt with the sock separates.
K: “I put the unmatched ones in your sock drawer.”
H: “Um, thanks?”
I guess I will soon be hosting another Sock Singles Mixer…