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Be delighted with yourself committing to organize your home is the first step in actually doing it! The Linen Closet will need attending to eventually so lets go there now.

If you have excess laundry to deal with, you probably have a linen closet that is less than user-friendly. Once you have clean towels, rags, and other linens to put away, you won’t do it if thier destination is less-than-appealing.

So let’s organize it! This is the first place where you’ll have to be brutally honest with yourself about what you keep and what you get rid of. When I say, “get rid of,” I don’t necessarily mean it ends up in the trashif it’s towels, bedding, etc., that are in bad condition, your local animal shelter would be grateful for your donation. They always need things for the dogs and cats to lay on in their runs and crates, and your cast-offs in this area will be eagerly accepted.

Take stock of what you have for shelves. Do you have wooden or wire shelves? Do you have problems with things “falling through” if you have wire shelves? If so, you don’t have to worry and go buy scrap wood to line the shelves witha simple piece of shelf-lining (you know, that bumpy green stuff that comes in rolls) will lie nicely and prevent small things from falling through. If necessary, put some of that down.

Now take a look and see what you’ve got in terms of extra bedding.

How many beds in your home? You should have a minimum of 1 extra bedding-set for each bed, a maximum of 2. Think about it before you start to write me and tell me why you need 6 sets of bedding for each bedif you have small children who have nighttime accidents (or get the stomach flu in the middle of the night), you might have to change sheets in the morning (or the middle of the night if it’s barf!), and you’ll have some clean ones to put on. You’ll put the dirty ones in the washer and get the machine started on that task. Then you’ll swap things to the dryer. You’ll still have clean sheets on the bed and if you’ve got 2 extra sets, another clean one in the linen closet.

So now with that argument won, go through your bedding. Do you have mis-matched pieces? If so, put them in the donation pile. Do you have twin pieces mixed in with king pieces? If so, separate them in two piles. Make sure everything is folded (I’ll give you a pass on the fitted sheetsthose are impossible to fold neatly!). Now set aside one or two shelves for your bedding. Make sure that the bedding for the queen bed is not piled up with the stuff for the crib or twin bed. You can fold the stuff in squares or fold it in to long rectangles and then roll it. Either way is acceptableit just depends on how much space you’ve got.

Now we move on to towels and other things in your linen closet

3. Take stock of your towels, washcloths, and other terrycloth things. Do you have towels that are holey or bleach-stained? Do you have towels that aren’t very absorbent from using too much fabric softener? Do you have towels that don’t match your current bathroom d

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Even an “entry level” computer today usually includes an 80GB hard disk for data storage. But if this is an “entry level” computer, does this suggest that you, as an “experienced” computer user, really need more than 80GB on your hard drive?

Let’s consider what 80GB really translates into. To do this, we will need to make some assumptions. First, let’s suppose your operating system is XP Home Edition, which takes about 2.91 GB of your hard drive. Let’s further suppose you really love to take pictures and use the program, Adobe PhotoShop Elements TM to fix and store them.

This means you should have at least 75 GB left over to store your photos. If you store your photos in the JPEG (.jpg) format, they will probably average about 800 KB each - meaning you should be able to store at least 90,000 photos on that 80GB hard drive.

Here’s another for example. Let’s assume that instead of being nuts about photography, you’re a serious writer and use, as I do, the great, free program OpenOffice.org Writer. In this case, you will need about 3GB for XP and OpenOffice.org, leaving roughly 77GB for your documents. I calculate that a page in OpenOffice.org writer is normally requires about 34 KB or 34,000 bytes. Assuming this is true, you should be able to store more than 2 million, that’s right, 2 million pages and still have room left over.

When I purchased the computer I’m using now -about 18 months ago - I figured that I really needed disk space. So, I paid extra for a computer with a 160GB drive. Now, I use XP, OpenOffice.org, PhotoShop Elements and something like 60 other programs on my computer - as well as hundreds of graphic files — and have used only 29GBof storage space. I have nearly 124GB left over and, at this point, can’t even imagine ever using more than 4GB to 5GB more.

At this point, a fair question might be, so what? Hard drives are so cheap, why not buy a really big one? I suggest there are two answers to this. First, if you don’t need the capacity, why pay for it - even if it is cheap. Second, suppose you do buy a 160GB drive. How will you back it up? After all, hard disks can crash.

A better investment might be to buy two 80BG drives - and use the second one for backup.

There’s something else that’s great but costs nothing. It’s a new form of broadcast radio called HD Radio that enables AM and FM radio stations to broadcast their programs digitally. These digital broadcasts provide listeners with radically improved audio quality, more radio channels through multicasting, and new data services. To learn more about this amazing new technology, just go my Web site, http://www.hd-radio-home.com, to get all the buzz.

Douglas Hanna is a retired marketing executive and the author of numerous articles on HD radio, the Internet, computer technology and family finances.

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I just organized my storage containers last weekend. I can tell you exactly what I did and you can determine if this system will work for you.

• Pull EVERYTHING out of the cabinet.
• Wipe down the cabinet while it’s empty.
• Look through your pile and determine what pieces you never use. Don’t put them back. Put them in a bag and donate them to Good Will, Salvation Army or sell them on eBay.
• Look through your pile again and seperate the items into two more piles. One pile is the items you use all the time. One pile is the items you want to keep, but only use occasionally.
• Go through each pile, examine each item and find its matching lid. If anything is damaged or missing a lid, determine if you still need it. If not, then throw it away.
• Starting with the occasional use items, stack them the best way possible and put them away. Since these are only occasional use items, they can go in the back of the cabinet. Keep the lids seperate. (You can stack more together without the lids.)
• Then put away the often used items closer to the front of the cabinet. Again, keep the lids seperate.
• Use one or two storage containers to hold the lids.

Now aren’t you glad you got that done?

About the Author: K.C. Gagne owns a website aimed at providing Life Balance for the Work from Home Mom. You may contact her thru her website or email at kathleen@connectingrainbows.com

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