Primer: A Place for Everything

A place for everything, and everything in it’s place.

(This is the first of a irregular series where I share my decidedly amateur wisdom on how to decorate a home in the hope of helping you move from ideas and inspiration to execution. I call it The Steampunk Home Primer. More shortly.)

Whether you subscribe to the minimalist approach or not, if you have too much stuff, it’s hard to do things that make your home beautiful – it’s hard to rearrange furniture, to paint the walls, or to install flooring. I also believe that a cluttered home weighs on your mind and adds stress to your life. Your home should be a retreat, and oasis of tranquility for you and your family. Having clear tabletops for eating and working on projects, open expanses of floor for kids to run through without tripping over anything, drawers and shelves in which you can find the things you know you have – all of this makes your life calmer and more in control. (But enough of my soap box…)

I learned about clutter “management” from Flylady, an online housekeeping coach. She has a book, a website, and a mailing list. The mailing list was the kick in the rear end that I needed to learn routines to keep my house in order – 20 or more emails a day, reminders and motivators and positive toned “lectures” that taught me habits of thought and activity that I still use, years after unsubscribing, to keep my house in order. If you are overwhelmed with clutter, this is where to start. If you just need a little bit of help, buy the book, browse the website, or try some of the ideas below.

One of the Flylady techniques is a “21 fling boogie.” Despite the silly name, it’s a great technique for making progress on cleaning up a room with minimum pain or commitment. Here’s how it works: Grab a trashbag and walk around a room, with a goal of grabbing 21 things to throw away. When you’re done with that, do it again with a goal of finding 21 things to give away. That’s it – you’re done. Do it again tomorrow, and the next day, etc, and eventually your room is clear enough that it becomes easy.

Another technique is to identify your “hotspots” – areas that collect clutter on a regular basis – and clean them up daily to keep them from getting out of control.

Another good source for decluttering advice is It’s All Too Much by Peter Walsh. Here’s two good tricks:
1) If you really love something, then you should honor it by giving it the space and prominence it deserves in your house. A shelf with three carefully edited knick-knacks shows them off better than one filled to overflowing with ten.
2) Figure out how much space you have for something, and declutter down to that space. Example: let’s say you have a lot of DVDs, and a 3 foot shelf dedicated to their storage. Measure how many dvds will fit into a foot space, multiply by 3, and you have your target quantity of DVDs to get to. Go through your DVDs, deciding if each is special enough to merit space on your shelf. When you get down to 3 feet’s worth, you are done. If you buy another DVD, make room for it by getting rid of one. (This method also works well for clothes in closets.)

The best filter I have, however, is “If you do not know something to be useful or believe it to be beautiful, get rid of it.”

One of the most important insights I’ve learned is that clutter often represents unfinished work – or unfinished projects. Because you see the potential in something, it’s hard to get rid of it. Since steampunk has such a strong “do it yourself” component, this is becoming a problem for me, and maybe for you. The best advice I can give for this is to designate specific spaces for this sort of material, and not to let it exceed its space. (My “in progress” steampunk material currently lives in a laundry basket in the garage, for instance.)

Unsolicited advice, just in case you want to embrace minimalist steampunk, or just need help getting started on your home.

Dr. Kim's "Office"

It all happened by accident... (Vices always do, don't they?) Dr. Kim was buying a sound booth from an elderly doctor friend.




When I arrived at his office to pick up the booth, he gave me a lot of the big, basic pieces. The vintage medical pieces were his and his father's (who was also a physician - and was, in fact, a patient of Sigmund Freud!) Almost everything works, the otoscopes light up, and the rolling cart has a working suction pump.




My students and friends found out I had the 'office' and started to contribute a lot of the other pieces including the stainless bedpans, old books, and signs. One friend just donated a (non-functional) X-Ray machine just last year. Who knew there was so much old medical stuff out there?!


The wooden medicine cabinet has a lot of patent/chinese medicines and cures donated by friends.

While I wasn't sure I wanted to know, but I asked the good doctor what he did in this lab.

It doesn't really have a practical application now, although I did use it as a 'lab' for doing makeup and visual F/X for a while; It's pretty much just an "art installation" at this point (I'm sorry to say: I'm not really a mad scientist...) although there will be a film being shot in it later this year; and it's been a set for various other shoots in the past.



He also had some advice (he is a professional F/X person, after all) on getting some of these effects in your own lab/workshop/home:

I would describe the paint as: "an industrial green, that was sunk with the Titanic, and then recovered." The running rust on the walls was done by daubing brown on the green base, and then spraying lightly with water so the brown paint would run down. As I add the wall mount items, I position them to match the position of the stains.

The frames of the windows and door were painted with a metallic base and then layered with an oxidizer used to create real rust. The rusty medicine cabinet was actually a new galvanized piece from Ikea, also sprayed with the oxidizer to create the rust.


Incredible, isn't it? There's a couple more pictures on Dr. Kim's website.

Update: Dr. Kim sent along a panoramic view for our enjoyment. (Click to get a bigger version...)

From left to right you can see: my (all too modern) computer monitor; the vintage floor-standing medicine cabinet (filled with Asian cure-alls); the victims' 'table-of-doom'; the 'rusty' medicine cabinet; otoscope; the rolling 'suction' cabinet; vintage "Vornado" fan; phone; hydraulic chair; radium storage (glows green in the dark!); antique books and bedpan/urinal set (above); and above the clock, you can see a tiny picture of the two original doctors, as well as a framed photographic diptych of Dr. Freud.