Organizing Meaningful Things
Last week I had the daunting task of traveling to Wichita, KS (where I was born and raised) to help my sister clean out a storage unit full of our childhood stuff. Boxes and bins of photos, video tapes, baby clothes, toys and books. Whew, I’m exhausted just writing about it.
From an organizational perspective, tidying anything that has sentimental value can be difficult. Whether it’s clothing we’ve grown out of, dishes that have cracked (but we used to love), or a couch we spent a decade watching movies on, choosing to part with something that has defined an era of our lives is emotional.
But, in my opinion, the hardest items to sort, purge and store are memories: photos, videos, items from our childhood, etc. It’s daunting because often these items are small, so there’s a lot of time-consuming sorting that needs to happen. But also, choosing to part with things can be painful and sad.
I thought it might be helpful to walk you through how I tackled it personally and share a few tips on how you can make organizing your own sentimental items as easy as possible.
Sort your belongings into categories.
I love to start any organizing project by sorting items into categories. Go through all of your mementos and look at things one by one. You can choose to throw out or donate anything that immediately is a “no” from you as you’re going (broken items, etc.), but you don’t need to make any deep cuts yet. Just organize things into broad categories like photos, videos, toys, clothes, books, art, etc.
Assess how much storage space you have.
Here’s the deal. Do I ultimately want you to only keep the things you truly love and need and part with the rest? Sure. Is that realistic? Not necessarily. Instead, I think it’s good to assess where these items will live and how much comfortable storage space you have. For me, I don’t have a ton of extra space at our house to store my mementos, so I wanted to keep it fairly minimal. But if you have a large basement or garage and plenty of room to store boxes, you don’t have to be ruthless about your purging. Be easy on yourself…you’re already doing the hard work of starting this process, it doesn’t have to be perfect right away. So figure out your plan for where things can go, buy some boxes or bins (I love these weathertight ones) and move to the next step…
Look through things one more time.
Now that you have an idea of how many boxes you can realistically fit and fill, I want you to go back to your categories and take a deeper look. Dive into the photos and part with any doubles. Maybe you set yourself some goals - like, “I want to keep one box of toys.” and then choose your favorites that will fit in that box. I like to imagine my future self opening my boxes of sentimental items and LOVING everything in there. So if an item doesn’t fit into that vision, bye! But again, you do not need to be hard on yourself. When in doubt, always keep something. You can always throw it away later, but you can never get it back, so tread lightly and give yourself permission to not be perfect.
Store things neatly and carefully (and maybe even display a few things).
Thinking about your future self, how would you like to ideally enjoy your sentimental items? I love the idea of pulling my doll clothes out of a box and seeing them beautifully folded. Looking at photos neatly tucked into a photo box. If something is really so special that it deserves to be kept in a box, I think that it also deserves to be stored well. Again, this takes time (and money sometimes), so it doesn’t have to happen overnight. But if you can carve out the hours to micro-organize things and label, I promise you’ll be happy later. And even better than storing…if there are a few things you’d love to look at or use every day, display them! I have this little pair of baby Nike sneakers that I keep in my closet and look at every single day. They make me so happy, and that’s much better than keeping them stored away for eternity.
To get you started, here are a few of my favorite products for micro-sorting mementos:
For me, I did several rounds of going through my items and whittling down what I was keeping. I hung on to some of my favorite dolls and toys for my future children, lots of handwritten cards and notes from loved ones, and photos that I hadn’t seen for years. Now they’re sitting in UPS boxes waiting for me to transfer them into boxes so they can be enjoyed for years to come.
