In 2012 I made it one of my goals to “Reduce clutter, organize and make our house more liveable.” I reiterated the goal in 2013: Reduce clutter, and all that.

I want to reduce clutter and have a well-organized home, not because I love organizing (I like organization, but I don’t revel in the act of organizing. I really prefer starting projects and not finishing them.), but so that our home is as functional as possible. This is especially important now that we’re filling our house with little ones and the huge plastic things they bring with them out of the womb.

One place that could use some organizing is our laundry/mud/craft room/pantry. We gated it off a while ago and now it’s just such a pain to step over the gate, sometimes we just throw things over the gate and promise to deal with them later, like when David is in bed. Or when he goes to college. (It’s actually not that bad; since you can see it from the kitchen, we keep things relatively sanitary.)

I keep my craft supplies in the laundry/mud/craft room/pantry. The majority of my “craft” stuff is yarn. I have a ton of yarn. I have yarn of all colors, weights and varieties that I’ve accumulated over the years. Even if I buy a very specific yarn for a very specific project, I never get rid of the leftover because you never know.

Here’s my organization system: I throw it all in a laundry basket, an overflowing laundry basket.  (See that bag beside the laundry basket? That’s a bag of leftover materials from the chair backers.)

I decided to organize it a while ago, and was inspired by this photo:

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I don’t have that kind of wall space (or shelf space, or anything space), so I decided I could stack more boxes (and store more yarn) if I used (long and deep) soda fridge packs instead of (tall and shallow) magazine holders. (All my knitting accessories, like pattern books, needles, and all that other stuff is pretty well-contained. My sister in law made me a beautiful needle organizer for Christmas, which motivated me to get my act together.)

But, I dunno, I didn’t like it. It made the yarn inaccessible and hard to see. In the photo above, there are lots of duplicate skiens, which I don’t have. Plus, it was hard to sort my  yarn by color. I have lots of blue-greens. Do they go in the blue box or the green box? See my dilemma? Someone call the UN, we need to figure this out.

Now instead of trying to organize the yarn, I’m trying to systematically use up what I have and resist buying more. But in the long run I need a better system.

I was thinking about these stackable baskets from the Container Store.

I didn’t learn that the Container Store existed until I was in my 20s. I didn’t actually visit the website until last night. Is it just me or is the Container Store expensive? Maybe if you have that many lemons in your home your house has fallen to a level of disorganization that you’ll spend any amount of money to corral them. I don’t know. I never own more than one lemon at a time. Maybe two.

This just seems like another version of the laundry basket system, though.

Anyone have any ideas? Lend me your organizing genius. How do you organize 100 balls of yarn?

Please don’t tell me you don’t have 100 balls of yarn.

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