With a 17-foot closet and, truthfully, not all that many clothes, it was a mystery as to how, exactly, my closet was always stuffed to capacity. True, I'm a bit of a paper-keeper. I have boxes and boxes of nearly daily journals dating back to, let's see . . . 1974. Still, I could never really account for the sheer volume of stuff I had until I dismantled my closet a few years ago and realized that empty boxes accounted for a a huge percentage of the stuff taking up precious room. They weren't storage boxes, either, but packaging from products I'd bought: camera box, computer box, the box that my cookware came in.
In the past, I've found that I have, in fact, needed some crucial bit of information--a lot number or Universal Product Code (UPC)--that's on product packaging, which is why I developed the habit of keeping such things. Since I don't need the actual box per se, but just some of the information on it, I realized that I could just cut the UPC or any other important information from the box and file it away. In this manner, I've freed up what must be hundreds of cubic feet of space, and it's a lot easier to find the information in a file than tearing through an (overstuffed) closet, searching for a specific piece of packaging. Just be careful when cutting those boxes, folks. We don't want any more xacto knife accidents.
