Organizing My Car

I all but live in my car... legitimately. Last year I put almost 35,000 miles on it (super glad I had a hybrid or the gas would have killed me!) between work, side hustles, choruses and folk dance, and errands around town. There were two small road trips in there to be completely fair but they were both only a couple days long so didn't make a huge impact on that number. All that is said mostly so that you understand why I have so much stuff in my car. :) 

This year I'm trying to keep my car organized, clean and clutter free. I haven't done super well on that if I'm honest but as part of the KonMari challenge I set for myself I thought that my car should count as a space that needed de-cluttering. Unfortunately I lost the footage for almost all of the actual sorting and organizing part of the challenge (nooooooo!) but I did manage to get footage of the afters and in some cases I had photos from in progress. That's the case for my car thankfully. 

When I cleaned out my car I really only had things in the trunk and center console surprisingly so this was the fastest area I de-cluttered in the entire process. It's rather cold here at the moment so I brought everything inside onto the couch to go through.

The coat and 'Heather' bag both have places they should be living other than in my car so they were put away immediately which left me with a minimal amount of sorting and some folding to do. The first thing I did was go through the trunk organizer (the blue contraption with white daisies on it). In it I had a lot of things that I haven't even looked at in a year including some medications. Oops. Those obviously had expired so they were disposed of as well as a package of dried out hand wipes, old papers and notebooks from classes and seminars, and various odds and ends that must have seemed important to carry around at the time I put them in my car. 

Next up was my emergency hygiene kit. You'd be surprised how often I have to break into this. Since I'm away from the house so often having a travel size of a few important things like makeup wipes, toothpaste, tissues and a deodorant in my car along with an extra pair of contacts and some feminine hygiene items means no worries or last minute dashes into a drug store if I'm in need of something. This saves me time and money and has been a part of my emergency kit since I was a teacher. 

This kit is stored in the front pouch of my trunk organizer bin for quick access. On the side pockets I have sun screens- in case I have little ones in the back seat- and a bag carrier tool that I haven't had a chance to try out yet. I may end up getting rid of it but I do want to see how it works before I do that. 

I put all of the bags, ID tags, and shirts for side hustles I'm trying out into the Favor pizza bag so that they would be available if I had time to pick up a shift. That is stored behind the organizer on top of where the car's battery is located. With a hybrid my trunk space was basically halved from other cars of the same model so there is a ledge that is perfect for storing items like that bag. Then I added a first aid kit, my Bible, a bag with pencils & highlighters (for chorus rehearsal), and the car's emergency kit (road hazard triangle, tools, jumper cables, and etc.) in the front two compartments of the organizer and an insulated cooler bag went into the last compartment. I used Marie Kondo's method of folding to fold all of my reusable grocery bags into the cooler bag and I was good to go. I don't believe she actually has a tutorial on how to fold reusable shopping bags but I used her method of making a rectangle, tucking in any bits that overhang it and them folding in thirds. Here's a video showing how I did this.

The entire process took about half an hour and having a clutter free car trunk has actually helped keep me accountable to my goal of keeping the rest of the car clean and organized. Right now I have to get it washed and vacuumed but other than that I would say it's clean and presentable. I just took a new hire to lunch in it and had no second glances from him or anxiety from me about the state of my car and I didn't have to make sure it was clean the night before. Steps in the right direction for someone as prone to a cluttered car as I have been known to be in the past. 

Did you include your car in your de-cluttering efforts? Let me know, I'm curious if I'm the only one who prioritized that space or not. 

​Until next time,