OrganizingLA Blog

Top 10 Online Return Policies - Return Your Unused Purchases And Eliminate Clutter

Whether you are in Beverly Hills, New York City, San Francisco or Miami, we consider clutter to be unused and unloved treasures you once thought you'd have a place for in your home or office.

In our professional organizing business, we often suggest that savvy clients be prepared to ask themselves how often they use things, and the cost of ownership of those things. Along the way we both discover items with tags and price stickers that clearly can be returned depending on the store the item was purchased to. This is where clients can save considerable money by returning their unused items (within a reasonable amount of time after purchase!)

Return policies for brick and mortar and online retail stores are more complex than income tax laws. Buy online (and wanting to return) and you'll spend umpteen hours working your way through phone trees and waiting on hold to talk to a customer "service" representative. If you're lucky, you'll get a refund. Otherwise, it's a store credit from a store you may not wish to patronize again.

Humorously, many of these merchants claim to offer "hassle free" returns. Some retailers, on the other hand, genuinely believe in making the process as pain-free as possible.

FreeShipping did some research and came up with the following top 10 online return policies.

How to Easily Avoid "Attack of the Killer Spiders" by Reducing Clutter

Hollywood has a long history of monster movies featuring giant bugs and insects.

Starship Troopers, Them, and The Wasp Woman are just a few of those Tinseltown jewels. 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders features William Shatner battling carnivorous spiders. But as we all know, Hollywood bases their fiction on real events... as in this story from this week's Sacramento Press.

"Spiders, long a favored subject of sci-fi movies and horror novels, seem to provoke an especially strong yuck factor in humans. Although we know on an intellectual level that they have many beneficial purposes in the eco-system, including eating other insect pests, most of us don’t want them in our kids’ bedrooms.

Now that warm weather has arrived, spiders are proliferating outdoors and often making their way into our homes."

The story points out that various spiders usually hang out in different California regions. A deadly spider, brown recluse, resides in the Southern United States but not generally in California. There's some comment in the piece about spiders being transported via moving vans into Los Angeles. A cousin of the brown recluse, the South American native Loxosceles laeta, has been spotted in Los Angeles County.

What can you do about spiders?

It is important to keep areas around your home (and office) free of clutter and debris. Get rid of the clutter and you'll gain control over a spider population because they reside in the mess. Remove the items, boxes, papers, clothing on floor. Seal up cracks and crevices and clean the corners where spiders may get in. Periodically move materials and furniture and vacuum garages, basements and living spaces. Keep debris, firewood, construction materials and stones outside your home. By following these suggestions and turning to the appropriate pest control experts when necessary will not only keep you organized, but will create a healthy home for you and your family.

There is more help on the internet, just Google "spider control" and you'll find additional resources.

Do you have any spider control regime tips or stories to share with our readers? Let us know.

"We are Moving!" image above courtesy Worth 1000

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Miraculous "Mint Memory Gum" Helps You Find Your Keys

Forget your key baskets, buckets and bowls, a new product is on the market to help you get organized and find your keys.

We were shopping for a client at Dick Blick Art Materials in Hollywood today and found this miraculous new chewing gum from Pittsfield, Maine-based Blue Q sitting at the check out. The box boldly said:

• Instantly remember where you left your keys!
• Find missing socks!
• Locate buried treasure!

We were all over Remember Where You Left Your Keys Gum, with its "intense memory stimulating mint" - couldn't wait to get home and try a piece, or two - and see if it worked. After all, Hollywood does seem to be the quick fix capital of the World. So why not try it? Anyway, love the fine print on the package:

Warning: If you have wrongly accused someone of touching your keys, now is the time to apologize. A small gift is appropriate.

What tips do you have for readers to find their keys? Do you know if there is a science behind chewing that stimulates memory? Does mint make you less forgetful? Can gum really replace using a simple hook by the front door? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Buy the Gum:

Remember Where You Left Your Keys Gum

Follow Blue Q on Twitter

Dick Blick Art Materials

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Simple Succcessful Strategies for Holiday Organizing

If you're anything like us, you have vowed each year after Thanksgiving that this year, this holiday season, you are going to plan the holidays right.

You're going to get totally, absolutely organized. Your cards will be in the mail early, gifts purchased and wrapped on time, decorations will be adorning your fireplace and your guest rooms will be ready and willing to take on your beloved relatives.

Ah, yes, in a perfect world.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday may have come and gone, but we have to remind you (as much as we remind ourselves) that getting organized for the holidays does not have to be a daunting task. To help this, we've asked our friends on Facebook and Twitter to send us their holiday organizing tips. We received so many tips and tricks we couldn't fit them all in one post, so look for more tips in the upcoming weeks.

Do You Really Accomplish Anything Putzing Around The House?

 

My wonderful father is a big "putzer." He can spend the entire day in the garage doing what seems to amount to nothing. He can rinse and repeat the putzing in his large garden, the shed, the long driveway up to our rural family home, not to mention his hobby of learning computers.

But I am not really making fun of Dad (seriously, nor do I dare, he's a amazing man), because I think on a smaller scale, I do the same. I don't know if putzing means you just want to be by yourself, it feels therapeutic, or maybe in my case, you feel great satisfaction from doing little things that amount to something. I've never asked Dad why he does it, nor would he care to discuss it, seriously.

For those that do not know, Urban Dictionary defines "putzing" as fooling about, tinkering, messing with, tooling around and dabbling. Some people claim that nothing would ever get done if it were not for putzing.

Experts that specialize in time management say you cannot accomplish anything if you don't concentrate on specific project chunks. Another words, nothing gets finished if you're tinkering. We're not so sure of that.

So are you a putzing kind of person? Is putzing a waste of time? Or do you contribute to the greater good? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image above of Runyon Canyon Los Angelees courtesy Alex de Cordoba and Flickr

Related Posts:

My Father's Secret Garden

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New York Magazine Presents John Trosko!

 

As part of his book launch, John was featured in the September 29th issue of New York Magazine.

This has been awesome and phenomenal!

In Space Efficient, Experts' Guide To Doing Things Faster creator Samantha Ettus mentioned us when she curated the "Best Best" section for the popular magazine.

Here's what they printed:

"Maybe you’ve been working at home for years. Or maybe just since last Monday..."

"Either way, you want a handsome and efficient workspace..."

"I heard about these Perf Boxes from organizational guru John Trosko.  They come premade and rotate independently of one another."

Link to the 9/29 New York Magazine table of contents

Link to the Best Bests column

Link to John's mention on page 66

Check out the mention in it's entirety on The Experts' Media site

Buy the Experts' book on Amazon.com

Perf Boxes image courtesy Design Public

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