Tag: storage

The.Best.Storage

Donna Joy
Plastic Bin filled with health and beauty "back stock"

I keep a giant basket under the bathroom sink that holds our health and beauty “back stock”: toothpaste purchased on a “must buy three” sale, shave gel from a company you can only order from online (so might as well order enough to get free shipping)… you know all the deals.

I’m a sucker for a good deal. I used to be an avid couponer too, especially back when I was going through about a thousand diapers a week. I love watching the discounted price get calculated at the register like I imagine a gambler loves the feeling of beating the house.

And it’s not just the thrill of the win. I like feeling prepared. I feel like I have my life a little bit together if I know my family will never squeeze the last of the toothpaste onto their brush without a full tube ready and waiting just a few feet away.

But over the years, I’ve discovered there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Products don’t last forever and can expire before I get to use them. Or something changes—like when I got older and needed to start wearing lotion with sunscreen every day, so the regular lotion I’d stocked up on just sat there, languishing.

For most things we use regularly, one backup works for us. When we use the last of the mayo, we pull the backup out of the pantry and put mayo on the shopping list for the week. Backup food goes in our pantry closet. Backup health and beauty items go in that bin under the bathroom sink. I still love a good deal, and if the deal is for 3 toothpastes we like (and the bin isn’t already overflowing) I’ll probably buy three. 

Anything much beyond that? I’m learning the perfect place to store those extras.

I store them…

At the…

Store.

That’s what the store is there for.

I get it. We lived through the toilet paper crisis of 2020. There’s a lingering fear of not being able to access what you need. But it’s a pretty rare week we don’t go to at least one grocery store. And if an emergency came up, I have countless stores between work and home, plus endless online options, not to mention any number of ways I could reach out for help to get what we need.

I don’t need Costco under my kitchen sink. Costco can keep my extras on their shelves. They can manage the cleanup if something accidentally spills and assign someone to check expiration dates. They can worry about the storage space.

And when I do run out and need to replace my backup? Chances are, it will be at the store, waiting for me.

This Week I’m Trying: The Purse Box

Donna Joy

Like most of my possessions, I have curated my purses down from what I unconsciously collected over the years, to an amount somewhere between a maximalist’s dream and an amount that would still suffocate a minimalist.

In my bag collection, there’s:
– my lunch bag that doubles as my work purse
– a vintage airline bag that fits my iPad and flute (for when I’m singing/playing)
– four other purses I use throughout the year
– and a few specialty bags that I don’t use regularly, but still made the cut: a book bag, some evening clutches, etc.

Listen, I never said I was a minimalist. 🙂 

Some bags are always ready to go. My singing bag and my lunch bag stay stocked because I use them for the same activities over and over. A long time ago, I created a little system for the less-used bags: I tucked them away with a single makeup bag filled with odds and ends I might want to toss in – like that super-slim hand sanitizer from a conference that perfectly fits into an evening clutch.

 I once decided I could streamline getting ready and cut down on decision making by keeping my other purses stocked like my singing and lunch bags.  I lined up my 4 everyday handbags and stocked each one with duplicates of my go-to items: tissues, chapstick, hand sanitizer, etc. I figured this way I could just grab and go.

But… not so much.

Every time I grabbed a bag, I ended up rechecking it anyway – wondering if I’d borrowed something from it or deciding in the moment I wanted a different flavor of lip balm (maybe a tinted one, because I’m fancy today). I always reshuffled. I spent more time getting ready than I would’ve if I hadn’t pre-stocked at all.

Then I saw someone online talk about their “purse box” – a small box in their closet where they dump everything out of their purse when they get home. The next time they go out, they take whatever purse they want,  and re-pack from the box.

It hit me like a stroke of genius…even though I’d basically already been doing this with my evening bags for years.

What I realized is that this system fits how my ADD  brain works:  stockedish. readyish.

It’s the same reason I don’t usually prep whole freezer meals. Instead, I double up on cooked meat or roasted veggies, freeze the extras, and figure out later what I’ll use them for. I like being flexibly prepared. I want ease, but I need options.

Here’s why I think the purse box could work for me:

  1. It lets me choose in the moment. The elements are ready, but I still get that spark of decision: which bag works with my day? Am I going to need to reapply sunscreen?
  2. It keeps me connected to my stuff. For some people, re-touching every item might feel tedious. But for a brain like mine that struggles with object permanence, physically putting each thing into my purse helps assure me that I have it.

So this week, I’m trying the purse box.

Not because it’s the “right” system. Not because it’s aesthetic or efficient or something a professional organizer would recommend.

But because it makes sense to me.

It’s one more reminder that the best systems aren’t the ones that work in theory – they’re the ones that actually work for me, in real life, with my actual brain.

Even when it means creating a glorified junk drawer, because it’s not about doing what’s supposed to work. It’s about utilizing what’s really helpful.