Spec House Time Machine

I love my house. It's perfect for my family, and we have developed a system of organization that works for us. There are times, though, that I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and do a few things differently. Most of my regrets have to do with the area leading to my back door. If I had planned it right, that space could be the most efficient space in my house, but it's far from it. For example:

• I wish I'd spent more time thinking through the storage in the laundry room. I really want my laundry room to look like this

but it doesn't. It's a jumble of cupboards filled with who knows what, and no room for either laundry baskets or hampers. Sometimes the only way I can tell the clean laundry from the dirty laundry (besides the obvious) is this: the dirty laundry is on the floor waiting to be washed, the clean laundry is on the red chair in the family room waiting to be folded.

• I wish I had re-constructed the linen closet by the bathroom before I moved in. Now that I have three kids in school, I dream of a storage system that looks like this

but mine doesn't. It's filled with a mixture of toilet paper, tote bags, loaf pans, empty vases, sometimes beach towels, sometimes things JP is hiding from the kids. I dream of having those three backpacks, coats and lunch boxes staged perfectly by the back door. But, unless my kids want to grab a roll of toilet paper, a loaf pan and a handful of foreign coins on their way out the door, the closet is useless as anything but a holding pen for things I don't know what to do with.

• The powder room would be perfect if I were a single girl with the occasional visitor, but is not at all functional for a family of five. If I had it to do all over again, I would replace the toilet with an industrial strength model with would support the needs of a sorority house, and I would replace our pretty pedestal sink with a more functional model that has storage. That way Jack's vast collection of Axe personal care products could be stowed away under the sink along with extra rolls of toilet paper. As I mentioned earlier in this post, rolls of toilet paper are stored in the closet across the hall from the bathroom. Very inconvenient as you can imagine if one finds herself faced with the empty roll still on the holder and no one within shouting distance to come to the rescue.

If we decide to do some renovating in our house, that area by the back door is going to be the first thing to go. I can imagine it completely reconfigured into one big room with laundry, bath and mudrooms all in one. Maybe we can even work in a little spot for Jasper.

Would You Like a Bedroom Set To Go With Those Potholders?

This weekend we had our long awaited tag sale and I must say, our sale was a good one. We spent the whole weekend together, generated $650 in cash, and found good homes for many of our treasures.

Our family motto throughout the weekend was "don't be greedy," so we bargained with anyone who asked. In fact, we held a "bag sale" within our "tag sale" in the last hour that was a big hit with our customers: we handed shoppers a bag and charged them $5 for all they could fit into it.

As we prepared for and executed our sale, we learned a few things through trial and error that we thought might benefit Suburban Zen readers. Here's our top 10:

1. You don't have to do a lot of marketing, but do some. We posted our sale on Craig's List and put signs up in the neighborhood. That's all it took to generate a heavy flow of traffic for most of the day on Saturday.
2. Prepare as if you were really operating a store: get change beforehand, make yourself a cash box with your change, pens, price stickers and a calculator in it, have bags on hand for people to carry out their merchandise (and for the occasional "bag sale" when you feel like some excitement).
3. Organize your items into departments. We had Kids and Babies, Sporting Goods, Apparel, Housewares, Books and Music, Furniture. I felt like I was working at Target.
4. Make your items look nice and appealing. As Jack said to me when he was merchandising his items: "if it looks like junk, people will think it's junk and they won't want it."
5. When you drop your prices, don't pull off the price ticket. Instead, put a big red slash through the price and write the new price next to it. Everyone loves a markdown.
6. Make a clearance table -- ours was "everything on this table 50 cents"--and transfer things to it that aren't moving throughout the sale.
7. Put signs on things in the garage that aren't for sale. Ours said "Not for Sale. Sorry. Maybe next time."
8. People can't resist a cute six year old selling cookies and lemonade. We made an extra $10 from our lemonade stand.
9. Make yourself a Garage Sale Mix to keep everyone motivated. Every time our mix came around to "California Gurls," Andie perked up and started selling.
10. Have a charity organization standing by to pick up after the sale is over. Sunday afternoon, Books for the Barrios came by and picked up a few boxes of leftovers.

Tonight, our garage and our house are all put back together, looking nice, organized, and a little roomier. We don't miss our treasures, and we feel good knowing there's a little girl somewhere in the east bay who got a cute pink trike from her grandpa today.

The Memory Keeper

At exactly this time last year, I made an emergency visit to my sister Lisa's house when she unexpectedly became very sick. The trip ended up extending to ten days, and when I wasn't roaming Tucson Medical Center waiting for news, I was roaming my sister's empty house.

I realized during those endless hours walking up and down Lisa's hallway that she has become the unofficial archivist of our family. We had very few pictures in our house when I was growing up -- my parents were very good at telling family stories and passing down folklore, but not so big on pictures. I think my parents preferred to experience those busy years without the pressure of having to photograph it all. I've wondered over the years where those few pictures we had went and now realize they've somehow all ended up at Lisa's house. Our grandmother's high school graduation picture, our parents' wedding pictures, pictures of the two of us as children dressed exactly alike sitting on the steps of our front porch. They're all there.

It's perfect, actually, because my sister got all the brains in the family. She is one of those rare people who is both extremely analytical and extremely creative, so she not only has the family photos beautifully framed, she has digitally archived them. I think if they were at my house, they'd all be in shoe boxes marked "flower pots" or some such thing and lost forever.

I've been thinking lately about archiving and labeling the Furber family pictures, as it's getting harder and harder in my old age to tell the babies apart in the pictures. For those like me with the will, but not the skill, to build a digital archive of your family history refer to this simple article written by Amy Urquhart "Creating a Digital Photo Archive" and some good information from the National Archives on preserving the originals. Or call my sister Lisa. She's all better now and has been posting all our old pictures on Facebook.

And Lisa, if you have that picture of me ten months pregnant with Andie in a bikini, we don't really need to keep that.