Another not-Tuesday tip: you need a home for homeless things bin

 Hey.  It's not-Tuesday again.  Here's a tip for you.  Or maybe a revelation?  Or a cautionary tale?  Feel free to use this (or not) however you wish.

I was listening to one of my favorite organizers and she said, among other things, that everyone needs a spot to put the things that they don't know what to do with: everyone needs a home for homeless items.  So when you come across something in your space, and you're not sure where it should go, you put it in the home for homeless items.  I know you've all heard the whole a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place mantra.  I have always had a problem with that, because I have always had things that I wanted to hold on to, but that didn't have an actual place.  This solves that issue!  

This is so smart!  The number one cause of clutter for me (and probably for most other people) is indecision.  If I don't know what to do with something, or where to put it, I just put it ... somewhere.  And then people (both me and other people in my household) see the thing there and think to themselves, "this must be the place to put things."  And before you know it, there's a pile, and no one's exactly sure what's in the pile, but it's messy and hard to look at and seems impossible to deal with.

While I was listening, first I thought, "that's brilliant!  We need a home for homeless items in our house!"  And then I thought, "um.  We actually already have a home for homeless items in our house, and it is our lonely socks bin."

This is our lonely socks bin.

In it, is one sock.

And a bunch of other things.

These are things that we don't know what to do with.  So we put them in the lonely socks bin, conveniently located in our laundry/mud room where we most often enter and exit the house.

The lonely socks bin has a purpose.  Its purpose is to be a place to put socks that have temporarily lost their mate.  Its purpose is not to hold thumbtacks a random screw, split ring, Webelos colors, tennis ball, large bells, command hooks, walkie talkies, disposable face masks, or anything that is not a sock.

This is our lonely socks bin now.

I brought the sock to its brothers*, and distributed the other items to more appropriate locations, including, in two cases, the trash.

I've decided that one, we need a smaller lonely socks bin, so that it's less tempting to throw random stuff in there, and two, we need a home for homeless things bin.

Now.  Where, exactly, I am going to put this home for homeless things bin is the question.  The laundry/mud room is the obvious choice, since that's where our unofficial HFHT bin showed up.  But the shelves in there are pretty full, so I'll have to do some rearranging. 

I'll keep you posted.  Maybe.

How about you?  Do you have a designated home for items that don't have a designated home in your space?

*bonus tip: buy socks that are all the same so you don't necessarily feel compelled to match them, and you don't feel like you need to throw away a perfectly good sock just because its mate developed an unfortunate hole