I had to write something about the Four Storage Options, which I take from a chapter in the book Confessions of an Organized Homemaker
I was spurred on to action because my wife offended me greatly by saying I have a “hook fetish,” (or fétiche as I prefer) which is most certainly preposterous. Just because I have 15,000 hooks in the kitchen, many more in the garage, hooks on my outside walls for shovels and so forth, and 3 pegboards, she thinks I’ve gone off the deep end. (I forgot to mention over the door hooks and hooks when you come in the house at both entrances.) Please be assured, there is nothing kinky about my relationship with hooks. Part of this comes from having a toddler–everything needs to be up high. Another part of this is my belief that the holy grail of home management is not having crap on the floor–hooks are a quick and visible place to accomplish that. Even if something is not in its “home” per se, if it’s up on a hook, you’ll be forced to circle back and deal with it when you see it hanging there. While things should be in their designated spots, this trick adds a bit of robustness to the housekeeping scenario.
Another part of my hookophilia is merely that hooks are one of the four (and only four!) storage options that exist. I shall talk more about hooks later, but I just want to throw my weight behind this theory: the four places you can store crap are hanging, putting in a drawer, on a shelf (this includes cupboards) and on the floor. That’s it! So I’ll talk more about my hooks later, but there you go.
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I prefer this kind of hook myself. But I will admit it is handy to be able to look up anywhere inside or outside the house and have a hook right there to hang your thingamajigs on. The difficulty comes when you want your thingamajig back. “I hung it on a hook” doesn’t narrow it down much.
Oooooh, now you are speaking Rob’s language. :)
He adores hooks. I don’t quite understand it, I think I prefer shelves and drawers. When we moved to Germany, Rob made sure we mailed ourselves over-the-door hooks so that they would be here when we arrived, only to learn that our doors here are fit into the frames in such a way that these type of hooks would not really work for us. It was a sad, sad day.