Are you tired of your “walk in closet?” Is it hard to claw your way into it because your clothes are jammed in like sardines? Is your garage a cluttered disaster-area with heaps of little-used storage containers, sporting equipment the kids haven’t pulled out for years and holiday lights – half of which don’t work? Is your laundry room a source of constant frustration? Mixed up piles of dirty and clean clothes eating up the floor. No…

If you think a shelf is just a shelf think about how frustrating it is when these things happen:

• Your towels and sweaters are a pain to put away because they hang over the edge of your too-shallow 12” deep closet shelving.

• Last year your 3-year-old son yanked the shelf right out of the wall. Fortunately, he didn’t get hurt – this time.

• You throw your high heels in a jumbled mess on the floors because there are “holes” in the cheap wire…

My wife Rose was hauling junk (including a Buzz Lightyear – circa 1995 sleeping bag) from our 18-year-old college-bound son Parker’s bedroom. This room was being repurposed into a “slash” room (it will be Parker’s bedroom when home from college, a guest room and a Zen-meditation space). I laughed when I saw the sleeping bag going out and got nostalgic about Buzz and those “back in the day” times when I heard the words, “To…

Do you know what’s making your closet disorganized today? There are gaps in your closet system. Some of these gaps (think of gaps as holes or problems) you see, many you don’t. You may be asking, “Mike – what the are you talking about? I don’t know if I see gaps. I just see a mess.”

Let’s look at a modern-day example of one system which has closed your personal “gap” in getting quicker, better and safer travel directions. This is a gap…

My life as a kid growing up was so like Kevin Arnold (he was the young boy in the TV show the Wonder Years about family life in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s). I lived in your typical Levittown-esque 1,500 square foot ranch home with 3 tiny bedrooms. I shared a 12’ x 12’ bedroom with my older much uglier (just kidding) brother Frank and the room was so tight our beds were smashed together. I used to wrestle my cousins on this bed…

My wife Rose HATES clutter and with 3 kids this can be a major challenge if you know what I mean! When I think about open shelving or closed cabinetry for our closets, laundry room and garage storage it’s a slam dunk for me to know what Rose would want (OK – I’m going a bit out on a limb here thinking I know what my wife wants – ha! ha!). She wants stuff behind closed doors and clean countertops (but that’s another conversation).

Although that…