You Missed a Spot is a new Spring Cleaning feature for the month of April focusing on the not so obvious places you will want to tidy up for the season! Each Thursday visit us for a new installment that goes beyond the how to’s of vacuuming, window washing and laundry!

{Cleaning and Organizing your Handbags}

If your the average woman, you have about 10 handbags in your collection and the average price of those bags is about $150 each. So, I am going to walk you through keeping your handbags clean and properly stored so that you are taking care of your rather large investment because you may not even know your not caring for your handbags properly!

You are going to need to make sure your handbag is empty so that you can properly organize it and identify any areas of concern that may need attention.

You will want to evaluate your bag to make sure its in good condition. If you find any stains, you will want to address them based on the fabric of your purse and try to get them cleaned off. If you find tears and the bag is expensive, contact the manufacturer to see what can be done.

Make sure the interior lining of you bag is intact. Often times, it can tear causing bits of dirt or even whole objects to disappear into the lining. In most instances you can probably repair the lining safely enough on your own, but if you have questions and the bag is pricey, again, speak to the manufacturer.

At this point, if you bag is clean and in good condition and you want to continue using it (remember, its probably one of ten and you may want to rotate!) make sure to be deliberate with the objects you carry inside it so it is not too heavy or filled with useless items. Also, make sure your makeup is contained in a makeup bag so that powders and lipsticks don’t break or melt on the interior of your bag causing stains or damage to the bag in the future.

If your bags were designer made, they may have come with a dust bag to use for storage, you should be using these but a dust bag alone doesn’t cut it as a storage solution! You must also make sure to stuff your unused bags with bubble wrap or tissue paper so that the bags keep their shape. You may not think this is necessary, but especially with leather bags, its easy for them to ‘deflate’ in storage, causing the leather to crack due to the lack of structure. Also, make sure to keep the bags in a cool, dry, and dark place. This will preserve color and give the bag longevity.

I guess I will leave you to it! Good luck and happy cleaning!

You Missed a Spot is a new Spring Cleaning feature for the month of April focusing on the not so obvious places you will want to tidy up for the season! Each Thursday visit us for a new installment that goes beyond the how to’s of vacuuming, window washing and laundry!

{Organize your Lingerie Drawer}

Your lingerie or underwear drawer is probably the last place you would think to organize, so I figured we should start there! Its not uncommon for people to hoard bras and panties thinking, ‘you can never have too many’ but the truth is, you should be filtering through your underclothing at least twice a year.

Bra’s: You should get fitted annually to make sure you are the correct size or anytime your weight changes significantly. Since we wear bra’s daily for hours at a time, they wear out quicker than you would expect, and you need to know what to look for in order to determine if you should keep or toss one!

Panties: Like bra’s your panties are worn everyday (hopefully!) and worn for nearly 24 hours in most cases! You should make sure to regularly check your underwear to make sure it is in good condition and immediately toss any undesirable pairs and replace them with a few new ones.

Stockings: Stockings may not be worn as often as your bra’s or panties, but they are significantly more delicate in most cases. Its not rare for someone to put a run or a hole in a pair of sheer stockings the moment they put them on, which is pretty upsetting because no one wants to toss something that’s new, but keeping stockings with imperfections, especially those in visible areas, is just not good sense.

I guess you’ll want to get to work now! Good luck and happy cleaning!

When I was 13, my mother and step father bought me a Handspring Visor PDA for graduating the 8th grade. I don’t think any gift before or after that had ever kept me as continually gratified. You see, I have been a tech geek for a long time, and I was obsessed with my step-fathers more expensive Palm PDA that I would steal away at every available moment to take notes, create useless calendar appointments and play games. I begged them for weeks for my own, I searched the web and Best Buy for the latest models available and when I found the Handspring Visor, which was more of a value PDA at the time, they agreed to buy it for me as my belated graduation gift. I didn’t get it until later in the summer, right before my freshman year in high school began, but I immediately began searching the internet for free applications I could download to my new device. Books, dictionary’s, note-taking and task management apps were my particular favorite. Go figure!

Once I got to high school, I ended up using my PDA to track everything from my homework assignments to my class schedule, extra-curricular events and social gatherings. I was particularly fond of tracking the money in my bank account, making sure to immediately input any purchases I made into a banking specific app that I used. The school newspaper even featured me in an article during my junior year that was all about students who use new technologies to keep themselves organized. I was certainly one of the few who relied so heavily on a PDA, in fact I only ever met a handful of other students during high school that even owned one. Eventually, I upgraded to a Palm Vx and then a Palm m505 (the later featured a color screen which I considered put me in the big time of PDA users!) during the course of high school. I loved my PDA so much and kept it with at all times. It stayed on my person or in my bag during the day, and after using it to read at bedtime (like the precursor to a kindle), it stayed on my dresser beside me as I slept.

I would say that this was definitely the most organized I had ever been and that was because for the only time thus far in my life, I used one dedicated device and method to organize my life. Once I got into college, something slowly pulled me away from my PDA. I think it was the lack of a rigid daily schedule. In college I had anywhere from one to three classes in a day. My wake up and bed time varied, and I was provided with a student calendar that was infinitely useful to me as a freshmen. So, instead of using my PDA, I switched to the pen and paper of the student calendar. Eventually, I wasn’t even using my PDA anymore and my entire system had been broken. Gradually, I was turning more and more away from the PC world I had grown up in and instead turning towards Apple products. One day, it eventually clicked in my mind that my PDA was the technology of a bygone era and it was time to search for the next big thing in personal organization.

However, after college ended, things pretty much stayed the same. I tried to get myself back into the PDA mentality when the iPod Touch first released. It seemed to me like the iPod Touch was the rebirth and natural progression of the PDA I had once known and loved. Almost like it was a PDA 2.0. But, alas, some mixture of lack of early functionality in the device and the touch based input never felt right to me. The Handspring and Palm devices used a stylus input method in which I could type on a virtual keyboard or, more frequently, write with the “graffiti” single stroke handwriting system that felt more natural to me.

After that, it was all downhill and uphill battles for me in the search for complete organization. I’ve learned a lot along the way about my own personal needs and about the nature of keeping organized so lets run through those ideas now.

I hope in the future I find a means of organization that feels as natural and exciting to me as my Handspring and Palm PDAs did at one time. Maybe its my fault for not trying hard enough to form a habit with one particular piece of technology, but it seems like everyday there is a more exciting and more promising option for organization that its often hard to focus on one means for too long. Perhaps thats the real problem though, a short attention span. These conundrums aside, I do know one thing for certain when it comes to personal organization. The best method for complete personal organization is the one you stick to completely. So, pick a method, stick it out and see what 2013 brings you!