Sometimes Laziness Works

I recycle just about everything I can.  I will even research online to find ways to recycle unusual items just so it doesn't have to go to the landfill. Which is one reason why my office  is always  a disaster.  I store these items here until I can figure out what to do with them.  I wish I wasn't like this.  I wish I could just throw broken items away and forget about them.  I blame it on an old PBS show I watched as a child.  It focused on how we needed to start recycling as our landfills were overflowing.  This was probably around the mid to late 70's before we had any recycling programs in our town.

When I went to college, the University of Pittsburgh was starting a recycling program and I was hooked.  I even brought things back to school just so I could recycle them!!  Paper was the biggest load.  I think it is one of the biggest problem most families have when it comes to clutter.  Several years ago I found out about Abitibi (though now it's called Paper Retriever) at a local college.  Since leaving college, I had no way of recycling paper other than burning them.  Yah, probably worse than just throwing them away!

A local high school obtained one of their containers and I was in Heaven!  I bought a cute plastic tub that would hold my paper until I could make a run.  Except, I would get lazy about it and my basket would runeth over.  And over......until somedays I would end up having to fill trash bags with the paper in order to get them to the bin.  I would still carry my nice plastic tub because it was easy to carry and I liked it. 



You can see the blue tub hiding under all the paper



And what does this have to do with laziness...... ;]   One day this summer after making one of my marathon runs to the bin, I left the tub on the kitchen floor near the back stairs. It sat there for weeks.  Luckily, I had my extra one already in the office collecting paper. 







Probably needs a little cleaning



Then it hit me one day.  This tub fits nicely here.  It also holds our flip flops and keeps the stairs relatively clear of shoes (at least the 3 leading up to the kitchen).  Wow! I found a nice solution to a very frustrating problem in my house. Too many shoes and no where to put them.  It may not be the perfect or long lasting solution, but it's been working great.  Plus, I think I will keep it here and store hats, gloves, and scarves in it as I also have no where to put those in the winter.  We don't have as many winter shoes and so it's not too much of a problem. 

Ignore the shoes to the right, I'm still trying to teach the family

to leave them on the stairs heading down to the basement.

That kind of organizing is the best.  It just naturally happened.  Now if that would only work for the rest of the house!