Ragtime

Some of you share my addiction. My addiction to home decor rags aka magazines aka shelter publications. Some of you are good about keeping them sorted and organized. Some of you are like me and have a place where you pile them until they threaten to topple and bury your small children.
My place to stack is primarily in the corner of our odd little hallway (odd because it has so many doors that belong to other rooms that you can close them all and turn the hallway into it’s own room if needed… Just one of the odd little things about our house…but I digress, but to my rag story…) We have small shelf there where I stack the magazines I want to keep, the magazines I need to go through and the magazines that I hastily scoop up from the floor of the bathroom or living room and bedroom and shove there when company is coming over.

See the handy (dangerous) thing about this corner is that when the door to the dining room is open you can hardly see the shelf and whatever mayhem it contains.

Another funny thing about our house is our door chimes. Yes, they are chimes – look at them – they are huge and loud and crazy and make the dog insane whenever someone rings them… If you visit, you might try knocking first. The dog will still go insane but at least there isn’t the reverberating diiiiiiiinnnnnggggg from the chimes too…

Tomorrow (if the rain stops) we are having a garage sale and I am trying to clean out various closets and corners and drawers to get rid of some of the “stuff” that is cluttering our house and our minds. For some reason I decided to start with the magazine pile. (If you are an addict like me and you live near by you should come, I have a huge pile of rags just for you…)

Here is what my newly organized magazine shelf looks like post-clean out. I didn’t think to take a Before Picture… But you should be grateful, it was shamefully dusty and piled sky high and stuffed with other non-magazine items. To say that this was a Forgotten Corner of the Housekeeping would be kind.

First I culled all the magazines I didn’t want or tore out what few pages I did and put them in a pile. Next I sorted out these “special” stacks:
Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Martha Stewart, Victoria and Special and/or Random Publications (single editions of Coastal Living, Veranda, Flea Market Finds etc.) and put these on the shelves themselves. Next I used all the magazine holders I had and sorted the remaining magazines (Home Companion, Country Living, Country Home and Romantic Homes) by month. I used to sort all my magazines by Name only but I found that when I go to look through magazines I tend to want all of one season – 4th of July or Christmas or Easter etc. Having them in these piles/holders should help me locate the ones I am looking for much easier.

I also kept one magazine holder out to store the back issues that I want to look at now, so I can cart them from room to room easily and hopefully keep them contained, reducing the risk of them escaping under beds and couches.

Eventually all of the magazines will make it into my studio and out of the hallway, and I can buy additional magazine holders for the stacks on the shelves (Christmas alone will take up 3!.) But that is another project for another day.

So my question for you is: Do you have a magazine addiction/stack? How do you organize them?