Organized Living

WHEN IT’S TOO HOT TO MOVE: PROJECTS FOR THE DOG DAYS OF AUGUST

The sultry days of August make it a good month to slow things way down, especially if you are facing the hectic pace of an upcoming school year. Use the heat as an excellent excuse to stay in one place doing as little as possible, or at least appearing that way. If you insist on keeping yourself busy around the house, go for projects that accomplish much while requiring little physical activity:

• Get out the boxes of photographs you haven’t filed, organized or otherwise arranged in meaningful order. Set up a comfortable spot outside of household traffic areas and take a few days to enjoy the task of going through them. This can be fun as a solitary activity or in the company of someone who appreciates the photos’ content.
  
  
• Retrieve every old magazine or newspaper you’ve been saving for whatever reason and stack them next to a comfortable chair. Go through each issue for the stuff you really want from them, and recycle the rest.
  
  
• Mend. People rarely mend these days, preferring to toss and buy new. Perfectly good clothing is wasted this way. Take a few minutes to repair the loose hem, replace the missing button, patch the play clothes. It’s therapeutic, economical and it just makes sense.
  
  
• Remove the drawer you refer to as your “junk drawer.” It’s an essential part of every home, but it needs periodic purging. Sift through its contents and decide what’s really useful. Discard the rest.
• Organize your linen closet.
  
  
• Go through the clothes closets and weed out things that don’t fit or that haven’t been worn in more than a year.
  
  
• Go down into the basement, if you have one, where it is blissfully cool. Clean off a shelf. Gather unused stuff for a garage sale. Iron. Clean up your laundry area or work bench. Wipe the cobwebs from the corners.
  
  
• Go through all of your child’s old artwork and decide what you really can reasonably keep. Take a photo of everything else.
  
  
• Polish shoes.
  
  
• Untangle knotted necklaces.
  
  
• Clean out the refrigerator.
  
  
• Clean out the bathroom medicine chest.