South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Get organized this autumn
Especially as the autumn months and school season approach, you might be overwhelmed by all that’s going on.
Fortunately, the principles of home organization can help you manage your belongings and the flow of traffic, people and things through your home. Here’s a rundown on how to bring order to your cluttered life.
Organizing pros say the most essential tool for reducing clutter isn’t a checklist or a storage bin — it’s your head.
Create a system that works for the way you live
Amy Tokos, president of the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals, suggests focusing on how you already use the space.
“People are already traveling through the house,” she says. “We want to embrace the traffic patterns and make it easy to organize your stuff. Simplicity is the key to staying organized. The fewer steps you have in any process, the easier it is to make it into a good habit.”
Even in an age of electronic communications, paper poses one of the biggest clutter problems in the home. These tips can limit paper building up:
Throw away junk mail immediately. Keep a small trash bin near your mail area for this purpose.
Establish a board for important family dates, paperwork and events. Throw away outdated paperwork.
Take photos of kids’ school artwork rather than keeping the original.
Set a limit on how many school keepsakes you’ll maintain each year.
Digitize what documents you can.
Turn the kitchen into a central hub
In recent years, kitchens have evolved from more than just a place to cook food. In many ways, the kitchen is as much the home’s central social and entertaining space as the living room.
“Kitchens have become the command center of the home,” Tokos says. “Think about how to organize it so that it’s functional. If your kitchen is designed only for cooking, there won’t be a place for paper or keys or coats, but that may be where they land.”
Whether remodeling your kitchen or simply rearranging what you already have, think about how traffic moves through your kitchen. As long as your traffic methods keep things flowing smoothly through your home and kitchen, that’s what matters most.
Establish command central
Even if it’s not your kitchen, every home has a zone where you get ready to head out for the day, and then drop your stuff upon your return. If you don’t plan for such a hub, it will always emerge on its own — and it might not be too pretty.
“Think about your family and what they do,” Tokos says. “Where do the kids come in the door? Where do they drop their backpacks, and where do they sit and do homework? Embrace the flow. Put up hooks for jackets and a spot for shoes and backpacks to land.”
The ideal hub is one your family members can use with little thought or effort. Ensure your zone has space for mail, wallets, keys, other paperwork, devices and device charging stations. Set up hooks for coats and bags. Establishing good habits makes for an organized home and life.
The first thing we notice is this piece of furniture is what we would call a “lady’s desk.” Its diminutive size and rather spindly cabriole legs plus the mirror suggest a place where the milady of the house could sit and write notes or letters to friends and relatives and check her appearance in the mirror.
We do not have a photograph of the inside compartment, but we suppose it has pigeonholes for holding correspondence, perhaps a shelf to store stationery, a drawer for stamps and other accoutrements and maybe a place to hold a ledger of some sort. The drawer underneath was probably there to store other useful items that did not need to be at hand immediately.
P.R. called this a slant top desk, but it is also called a drop front desk, a slant front desk and occasionally a fall front desk. We really have no strong preference, but “slant front” seems to be the most descriptive and the most often used.
The second thing we notice is the wonderful grain in the oak that was used to make the piece. “Tiger stripe” oak might be used to describe it, but the pattern is so bold and so randomly scattered that it transcends most tiger stripe pieces and becomes a bold pattern all its own. And this is the glory of this otherwise rather plain desk. You might call it “tiger stripe with a vengeance.”
The label found on the desk indicates it was made by the Herzog Art Furniture Company, which was also designated on the labels as the Herzog Table Company, both of Saginaw, Michigan. The part of the label we can read says they primarily made music cabinets, parlor and library tables, plus another item or category that we could not decipher.
Also on the label is the indication that Herzog initially shipped this to
A.C. Robinson and Son in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, of Groundhog Day fame.
There is not a great deal known about the Herzog Art Furniture Company except that they were founded by John Herzog circa 1900 or a little before and merged with the Sonora Phonograph Company in 1923.
The desk in today’s question was made circa 1910 and is a style of Herzog furniture that seems to turn up quite often.
Oak furniture is a bit out of fashion at the current moment, but the beautiful grain on this example is a plus. For retail purposes, this piece should be valued in the $300 to $350 range.
Helaine Fendelman and
Joe Rosson have written a number of books on antiques. Do you have an item you’d like to know more about? Contact them at Joe Rosson, 2504 Seymour Ave., Knoxville, TN 37917, or email them at treasures@knology.net. If you’d like your question to be considered for their column, include a high-resolution photo of the subject, which must be in focus, with your inquiry.