Clutter Busters

[February 13th, 2008]

The crap drifts are getting knee-deep. I haven’t seen the cat for days. I have to face it: It’s time to get organized. I suppose I could just throw everything out, but that would be too easy. No, I’m going to put my life in order by buying more stuff! Here’s how:

Clingy Condiments

First, hit the spice cabinet, where row upon row of dusty, mislabeled jars of God-knows-what spices lurk, waiting for you to reach in at random and fill your eggnog with turmeric. Save yourself the fumbling in the dark with the Magnetic Organizer System ($19.96, Kitchen Kaboodle, 404 NW 23rd Ave., 241-4040) , a 12-by-15-inch stainless-steel sheet that, mounted on a wall or inside a cabinet, serves as a magnetic spice rack for cans with transparent tops that eliminate the need for penciled labels.

Skinny Strainer

Now hit the lower cabinet, where a stack of clunky colanders take up more than their due space between macaroni nights. Ditch those bulky layabouts in favor of the Incredible new Flat Fold Colander ($14.99, flatfoldcolander.com) , a shiny white hunk of “food-grade polymer material” that—can it be?—folds flat for easy storage! In a cabinet! Or even a drawer! And it’s all dishwasher safe! Holy crap! I’m ordering seven.

I can see clearly now

The anonymous bags of bulk foods have got to go, too. Pour ’em into handsome Pyrex Canisters ($16, Canoe, 1136 SW Alder St., 889-8545) and display your collected wealth for all to see. Don’t stop at the kitchen—stuff everything you own into chrome and glass jars, from thumbtacks to tampons to souvenir soaps, and line every shelf in your home with labeled shelves. It’ll feel like living in the British Museum, but you’ll never lose anything again.

The in-out crowd

While kitchen chaos is annoying, that mess on your desk could land you in debt, prison or worse. Take command over the piles with Blu Dot’s In/Out box ($45, Office, 2204 NE Alberta St., 888-355-7467) and letter holder ($25), punched and folded from single sheets of colorful powder-coated steel. Stylish, stackable and strong, these babies will keep your piles in order right through the coming apocalypse.

We’re hooked

You know what your home really needs? More hooks. Lots more hooks. It’s the best way to get everything that’s lying on the floor off of it. We’re particularly fond of the Art Nouveau Iron Double Hook ($3.50, Rejuvenation, 1100 SE Grand Ave., 238-1900) , a gracefully upswept cast-iron number. Screw them to your walls in level rows, just below your shelves of specimen jars, and hang everything you can’t bottle.

Salvage chic

If your tastes in home furnishings lean more toward “shabby chic” than “retro mad scientist,” the elegant wall cabinets by ReFind Furniture ($100-$125, The ReBuilding Center, 3625 N Mississippi Ave., 445-1756) make a nice substitute for jar racks—though you’ll have to lose your Tesla coil if you want to really tie the room together. Made almost entirely from salvaged Douglas fir and old cabinet doors in a Portland workshop, these attractive display cases are a fine home for the knickknacks that would otherwise populate your windowsills.

Get compact

Here’s one for the cyclists. Stop straining your rotator cuff with 20 pounds of bike gear—replace it all with the Crank Brothers Multi-19 Tool ($28, River City Bicycles, 706 SE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 233-5973) , a sleek 3.5-inch fistful of steel that includes four spoke wrenches, five hex wrenches, two screwdrivers, two open wrenches, a chain tool and (pant, pant) a handsome stainless-steel carrying case. As design-fetish objects go, this one’s awfully useful.

C-cell corral

Cull the proliferation of batteries rolling around in your drawers, bumping into your Flat Fold Colanders and generally making a nuisance of themselves with a battery rack ($14.95, Storables, 105 NW 13th Ave., 221-4500) . This homely but handy plastic rack holds 40 batteries in every size, from AAAs right through 9-volts, right where you can reach them. Plus, it keeps them from getting all sticky in the bottom of your fridge. Eww.

Meet Antonius

Sometimes you need to haul out the really big guns, and that’s why Jesus invented IKEA’s Antonius Storage System ($25-$188.95 per section, IKEA, 10280 NE Cascades Parkway, 282-4532) , a modular, endlessly customizable product line created to make use of every spare inch of wall space. Before you shell out the money, though, make sure you have the time and will to undertake a major organizing project. You may want to call in an expert like Anne Hughes (see page 4), Penelope Rose Miller (page 13) or the folks at Organizers Northwest (245-3564, organizersnw.com), who will help you make sense of your mess for an hourly fee.

Seductive Storage

The downside of an IKEA-created storage system, besides its foreign provenance and labor-intensive assembly, is that it makes your laundry room look awfully proletarian. The elite don’t buy flat-pack, dear. They buy California Closets (price varies, 18862 SW Teton Ave., Tualatin, 885-8211, local.calclosets.com) , the sleek, custom-built storage installations of the rich and famous. If you’ve got the green, they can create a way to store all your crap and (if their ads, featuring attractive couples in suggestive poses, aroused by the knowledge that their clothes are organized by color in a unique walk-in closet installation, are to be believed) get you laid.