Product Description

Are you a Collector? A Concealer? An Accumulator or a Tosser? Find out how to end your household clutter once and for all according to your personal junk style with the Q.U.I.C.K. (Quantify, Unload, Isolate, Contain, and Keep It Up) method developed by everyday experts in the field of cleanup. From tossing tips to storage solutions and organization ideas, theres nothing these folks havent seen, and theyll help you tackle every room in the house, clearing big messes and little ones. Illustrations help demonstrate do-it-yourself clutter busters. From kindergarten teachers telling you how to organize a kids room to professional recyclers tips on how and where to recycle practically everything, youll get the straight scoop from folks who live these issues every day. Get your information from the source, not a cut-and-dried efficiency expert. This is the book that readers will turn to again and again as an invaluable tool for organizing their homes and simplifying their lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63429 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Library Journal
Whether one is a tosser, an accumulator, or a concealer, this book contains a wealth of advice on how to control household clutter. Beginning with a system of quantifying, unloading, isolating, containing, and keeping it up (QUICK), the book examines each room of the house and identifies common problems, such as too many loose recipes or jewelry jumble. It then offers specific, practical solutions, with advice from real people on how they keep organized. Lists of resources for storage products and organizations accepting household items for donation are also given. Similar to Julie Morgenstern's Organizing from the Inside Out, this book will be an excellent purchase for public libraries.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

From the Back Cover
1,237 Terrific Clutter-Cutting Tips-- Plus Hundreds of Insider Secrets From America's Clutter-Control Experts!

Is clutter taking over your life?

It's time to take some Q.U.I.C.K. action, cut the clutter, and stow the stuff once and for all!

Cut the Clutter and Stow the Stuff will help you tame the clutter monster using the revolutionary Q.U.I.C.K. clutter-control system. You're just five fast steps from a clutter-free home! See inside to:

Discover your unique clutter style-- and how to make it work for you, not against you, in the fight with clutter. Take the clutter quiz on page 8. Once you know your clutter style, you'll finally understand why you feel compelled to collect every style of Spode teacup produced since 1856...or stash a year's worth of newspapers under the bed...or keep your 45-year-old son's high school football jerseys "just in case." And you'll find effective strategies to turn those tendencies to your advantage!

Rediscover your rooms-- and your furniture (when was the last time you saw the top of your dining room table?!)-- with the simple steps in the Unload chapter on page 43. There really is a house under there!

Find storage space you never knew you had, even in cramped quarters like the bathroom and laundry room. It's there-- once you know where to look for it.

Clear out the kids' rooms without starting a war. These ingenious tactics are so effective, your kids may even pitch in!

Make all those piles of paper disappear like magic. Right now, your paper piles are probably multiplying faster than hot dogs at a ball game. But you'll find how to get them out and keep them out (even at the office!) starting on page 316.

"Cut the Clutter and Stow the Stuff is the first organizing book to make it easy for readers to solve their most vexing problems. Easy to navigate and packed full of great tips, no other book of its kind is this comprehensible."--Linda Koopersmith, The Beverly Hills Organizer

Customer Reviews

Cut the Clutter, Stow the stuff
I believe this book to be very helpful. IF you are not impaired in the ways of organization, then of course this book would have useless ideas for people who already know them. For those of us with this problem of not knowing how to organize, this book is great. It showed me how to organize space more efficiently, gave me a different outlook on how to use different rooms in my home and gave me some resources for what to buy for cabinets, closets and entryways. It is VERY helpful and full of all different advice in the way of organization. IT points out the psychological reasons we hoard things,,,,what type of clutter person you are and with that information helps you fight the habits that got you to the place where you needed to buy the book in the first place. Reading the other reviews, I believe them to unfairly put this book on a low level, seems maybe these people did not need the help to begin with??? It helps...it has major ideas and a lot of them in an easy to grasp format that is easy and pleasurable to read.

Rehashed for Cash
This book seemed a lot of already-heard organizing ideas rehashed by Rodale to make money. They should have had the person who wrote the marketing piece write the book! Confusing style, not funny - too cutsie, much too wordy... in a word... cluttered.

Lame and laughable
I personally can't believe someone got a book contract for these obvious and/or lame rehashed suggestions about managing the stuff in your life. Some examples:

One guy saved space in his bathroom by getting rid of his hairdryer when he went bald. That one's headed "No Longer in Dryer Straits."

If you have more than one bathroom, keep a clothes hamper in only one of the bathrooms.

When you clean out the bathroom cabinet, "take a big plastic trash bag and a couple of big boxes with you to your bathroom battlefield and keep them in easy reach. Be sure that the bag is sturdy enough to handle the weight of all the items that you'll discard. Tops on the list: old tubes of toothpaste, the empty carton that used to be full of cotton swabs, the cologne your husband never, ever wears. When the job is done, tie it [I'm assuming she means the sack, not the husband or the cologne] up and make one trip to your trash cans."

"....As you unearth spare stands of dental floss, odd buttons, old pantyhose, and other items in your bathroom cleaning binge, Courtney Watkins [a former kindergarten teacher whose creds golly gosh include appearing on The Donny and Marie Show and doesn't that impress us all?] encourages you to use those materials to boost your child's creative powers. 'I think I have the most fun cleaning and organizing when I look at my collection of things and say, "What else can this be?" ' says Courtney. 'Playing the game of What Else, you push that muscle of creativity and ingenuity both in your child and you.' "

I submit to you that Courtney and author Lori Baird don't know what real clutter is. Buy Karen Kingston's Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui instead. It works and it's interesting!