A Place For Everything . . . and everything in it’s place.

It’s an old adage . . . one I remember my grandmother saying, though I don’t remember that she was a particularly organized person. But it’s certainly apropos for life in Picasso.

We live in 84 sq ft of space. That includes an almost full bed, a stove and sink and refrigerator and microwave and toilet and shower and storage cabinets and a two person dinette . . . the definition of compact and then some.

There is a small storage area under the bed that is accessed from the outside, but it’s primarily utility storage. All of our clothes and cookware and food and linens and miscellaneous ‘stuff’ has to be stowed in the nooks and crannies and limited cabinet space.

Our first strategy was to buy stacking plastic drawers for our clothes. That worked so well on short camping trips that we decided to expand to covered plastic boxes for cookware and dishes and canned and dry goods, stacked on top of each other in our limited storage under the refrigerator and sink and stove; and extra batteries and games and miscellaneous odds and ends in more covered  plastic boxes stacked on the shelf Paul built over the dinette.

You’ll notice the operative word is ‘stacked’. Every time you need something, if it’s not at the top of the stack you have to move what is on top to get to what you want. I’m not complaining mind you. It works. I can’t believe how much we’ve been able to put into our 84 sq ft and still have room to move around.

Having done most of the inside packing I’m the one who knows where everything is. Paul is a little less sure. As you can see from the photo, he finally found a place for his washcloth so that he wouldn’t forget where it was.

Of course our art supplies are in the car. Along with the golf clubs and extra dry goods and paper towels. But the biggest lesson we’ve learned is what we brought along that we don’t really need . . . like too many clothes and those pesky golf clubs . . . used twice, maybe a time or two again when we meet up with Dotti and Mike in Tucson for a few days, but not really worth having along.

It’s been an adventure . . . and everything fits. Next time without the golf clubs we might even have some spare room for that pesky washcloth.