Josie Barnard discovers that when it comes to organising shelves, as well as life, there’s more than one way to do it.
Josie Barnard
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I always thought everyone put their books in bookshelves the way I did - alphabetically. Then I moved in with my partner. He orders his books according to size. One of our first arguments happened when I came back to find my books divided into piles of small, medium-sized and big.
Finally, we came to an agreement : separate bookshelves. And, actually, as long as I don’t have to comply with it, I can appreciate his system. It can be fun to go in for a Jane Austen and come out with a book on 16th century human anatomy instead.
So I have my wall of bookshelves, he has his. All fine and harmonious, until we came to the kitchen. I got back one afternoon to find he’d organised our kitchen shelves the same way he organises his bookshelves. Apart from anything else, my partner’s taller than I am, and half the spaces he’d decided to use were within reach of someone who’s 6 foot 3 when I’m 5’7".
Soon, everything was off the shelves and on the floor, and I was in the middle, re-arranging his rearrangement. I nipped out and bought a set of matching green plastic boxes. My plan categorise - `side-plates’, `spices’, and so on. If I could get my partner to agree.
The first box he inspected was only half-full - he railed against my inefficient use of space. He pointed out that all my aesthetically pleasing green boxes had lids on. Each one had to be pulled right off its shelf to be opened. He was right. Getting pasta out of one box, flour out of another, grater out of another took much longer than casting a quick eye over everything and just grabbing.
Somehow, life took over. A bargain buy of linguine was too much for the pasta box and spilled into the `currants and raisins’ section, while self-raising flour got moved away from the other flour because our five year-old decided that was the place for his money box.
It may have been more by accident than design, but we did compromise. I decided that it was actually quite right and proper that our kitchen shelves should be chaotic, because we are.
