Thomas Wentworth wrote:
I have pulled everything out. Taking a look at how I store whatever and
where.

For fun, what do you ( cruising sailboat sailors ) and where do you store
your equipment.

As in ::: what goes in the lazaret? what goes in port locker? starboard
locker? what goes under the ??? and what goes over the ?????

this isn't exactly an answer to your question, but it's related. one
thing my step-father does that i used to think was a little over the
top is that he catalogs basically everything. though overkill in a
house, in my opinion, i have started to do this with some things and
i've found it extremely helpful. it's so nice to just be able to look
and see what you have on paper and know where it's stored. on a boat i
would think this would be extremely useful, to keep some kind of
informal or even formal database of pretty much everything that is on
the boat and where it is. especially useful when it's time to go
shopping to replace things you've used.

another thought that comes to mind because i've been focused on it a
lot lately is simply buying containers for things. how often does
stuff just sit around in the plastic bag you walked out of the store
with, or how often have you kept some dumb cardboard box that some
piece of electronics came in, etc. just taking all the dvd's out of
their plastic containers and putting them all into one hard case
container made to hold them saved me quite a few cubic feet of space,
now what used to be piles of dvd's all fit in two little metal cases.
who really reads those little fold out papers in a dvd case anyway, and
do you really watch the "bonus material" they insist on sending along
with the movie ?

of very high value for me is keeping all the software i install on a
computer in one spot, usually in a notebook. that goes for radio
equipment too, all those little user manuals you are going to someday
need but don't want laying around, it all goes into a notebook. that's
stuff that i would normally toss down on a table somewhere and
eventually lose. i find that very helpful for obvious reasons, but
it's also useful for not so obvious reasons ... when that special
antenna gets busted and you're left trying to remember where you bought
it so you can replace it, it's nice to have a receipt showing where it
came from.

in short, when i buy things now i am, more and more, really trying to
think in advance how i'm going to store it, how i'm going to remember i
even bought it, where to put it to have it handy, etc. it's all new to
me, i have piles of cardboard boxes in storage buildings that i don't
even know what's in them anymore lol.