Peace of Mind Organizing

Decluttering my keys

2 September 2013

I’m a big believer in having one place where the keys are placed when coming in the door. In our house, it’s been a coated-wire basket just inside the back door, where we enter from the garage. We now automatically drop our keys right in the basket.

The trouble was every key we owned was in that basket, so in order to find the keys I needed on a daily basis, I was having to do a little searching. After a few months of telling myself I needed to do something about it, I finally did.

I thought maybe key hooks would be a good idea for our most frequently used keys, but my husband really likes the ease of just dropping the keys in a container. And who am I to argue with ease?

So here’s how it went, step by step. I was a little surprised that it ended up taking two full hours, but it was time well spent.

Here’s how the key basket looked at the beginning of the two hours:

Step One: Empty the container and sort

I emptied the basket and sorting the keys by category. (I discovered lots of non-key items in the key basket as well.) Here’s a photo of the contents of that basket, spread out on my kitchen counter:

There were five categories of keys:

• House keys (a full set for each of us)
• House keys (a subset, for dog walking)
• Car keys (two cars, each with two keys)
• Keys to friends’ homes
• Keys to a work locations
• Untagged mystery keys

Step Two: Solve some mysteries

I took the mystery keys and tried them on our doors. We have a two-family house, but we live in the whole thing. That means we have two front doors and two back doors. And one of our front doors has two locks, though we only use one of them.

In that process, I was able to identify seven previously unidentified keys to our house:

Step Three: Label the keys

I got out my label maker and created labels for all the keys to our friends’ homes and work locations and for the newly identified keys. I didn’t bother to label the keys that are on our daily key rings; we know them by sight.

Step Four: Organize the keys in a new container

Barry and I agreed that the wire basket wasn’t great because keys would sometimes get caught in the holes. So I replaced it with a clear plastic drawer organizer I had on hand. Since one of the problems had been that it was hard to find the keys we needed among the many keys in the basket, I decided to place only the first three categories of keys in this new container. (Main key rings, dog-walkings, car keys.)

I put the labeled friends’ keys on a carabiner and the extra keys for our doors on a binder ring. I placed those two bundles in a basket that sits on the shelf next to the key basket. (That basket also holds eye glasses and cases.)

Step Five: Organize a few non-key items in the container

There were a few items in the old key basket that we like to have close at hand when we’re walking out the door. They include lip balm, lactase enzyme tablets and a little magnifier/flashlight that makes menu reading easier, and a small flashlight for nighttime dog walking. So I took a smaller drawer organizer and put into the larger one to isolate most of those items, so they’re not in the way.

Overall, I’m really pleased with how this worked out. It’s not perfectly organized by any stretch of the imagination. But it is organized enough: The keys we need most often are easier to grab and it will be as easy as ever to put them away. Now we can easily identify our friends’ keys when we need them. And if we need an extra set of our own to give someone, they’ll be easy to find.

(I bet you’re wondering what we did with the keys we couldn’t identify. The organizer in me wanted to get rid of them, but my husband was more comfortable keeping them. I put them in a zip-top bag marked “These keys are not for our house” and put them in a drawer in our extra kitchen where I would know to look for them if we were ever looking for keys that someone said they had given us.)

Tagged with: clutter, clutter clearing, declutter, decluttering, keys

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