APR
29

The S.O.S. Guide to Taming the Storage Room Monster

By Brian D. Taylor, Project Editor, Pioneer Drama Service 

Brian D. Taylor is the project editor for Pioneer Drama Service, a published playwright and a former drama teacher.  Working with K-12, college and community theatre groups, he has a wide theatrical background with experience in directing, acting and technical theatre. 

Congrats!  You made it through your spring production!

If you’re like I was at the end of a big production, it’s possible that you may not want to lift a finger for the next two and a half months.  But...  have you seen your costume closet lately?  Have you noticed the mess in the prop room?  Has chaos made a home in your storage space?

Over the course of a school year (or, heaven forbid, over the course of several school years!), these storage areas can become a giant mess.  Now’s the perfect time to get in there, dig out, and tidy everything up so that your storage space will be a little less chaotic in the fall.  Hopefully, the suggestions that follow will even help you maintain a sense of organization in the years to follow.

So, how can you create and keep order from the chaos?  Here’s my easy S.O.S. Guide for prop and costume room cleanup.  In just three easy steps — Stock Management, Organization and Systemization — you can be well on your way to the storage area of your dreams!

Stock Management

Start your cleanup project by tossing out the excess stuff you will never use.  If this is difficult for you, think about creating space for the awesome props and costumes you’ll need in the future.  Now is the time to discard or donate items that are broken, torn or out of shape.  Granted, there may be items that can still be fixed.  If it’s something worth holding on to, then by all means set it aside for repair.  But for those items that are just trashed, there’s no good reason to hold onto them.  Toss ‘em.

You also should consider discarding some items that are in good shape.  These are items that may have seemed fantastic at one point, but there’s no real, foreseeable use for them.  For instance, I once found a winter sweater in my costume closet.  The sleeves on this thing were designed to be the faces of horses, complete with a feather boa “mane” on each of the shoulders.  While quite unique, realistically there was no way I would ever use that particular piece.  Out it went.

Finally, now that you know which items you will be keeping, create an inventory for every item in storage.  The easiest way to do this is in the form of a spreadsheet.

I know starting an inventory for your department sounds tedious, but in the long run it will save you loads of time.  Besides, once it’s initially done, it can be easily updated as things come and go.  The inventory will be surprisingly useful in other ways, too.  For instance, if you have a complete list of all of the costumes in your shop, you may not even have to physically be in your shop to determine whether you have a costume for a particular character.  You can also easily keep track of which items are used for each show, so you can see which items are most useful and which items are not.  This will make it easier in the future to determine which items can be discarded or donated.  Check out the links included at the bottom of this article for great templates for starting your own inventory.

Organization

Start with a clean slate.  Pick an area to start on, say a set of shelves or a costume rack.  Then, clear it off completely, setting aside whatever might already be stored there.  This way, you have a new space to work with and you may find better ways to use it.

Before you fill them up again, build, repair or update shelves and racks.  Use strong materials for this.  Prop storage shelves and costume racks take a lot of abuse.  If you’re going to the trouble, build them with the best and strongest materials you can afford.  In two years, when your costume racks are still standing, you’ll be glad you did.  Also, if building new storage racks or shelves, try to use space wisely.  Why waste the space above and below?  Double up costume racks so they have two levels.  Build shelves that reach from floor to ceiling.

Now begin to fill in the empty space you’ve created.  Fill in prop shelves with empty containers.  Milk crates, plastic tubs, cardboard boxes, five gallon buckets, and old coffee cans make great containers for shelving props.  Once you have your containers neatly arranged, it’s time to fill them.  At this point in the process, there are four important rules of thumb that should be followed:

1. Everything must have a place or a home.
2. Every prop is stored inside a container (important so things don’t fall off of shelves.)
3. Every costume must be on a hanger.  (Accessories or small costume items have a box or drawer.)
4. Like items should be stored together.

The whole point of organizing is so you can easily find an item in the future.  That’s why it is essential to store similar items together.  For instance, fake food items might all go in the same box or all of the prop books go into the same tub.  Every costume has a hanger and a place on the racks with similar garments.

There are many ways you can categorize and sort items:

• By genre (Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Western, Mystery...)
• By setting (school, office, home, forest...)
• By type (weapons, food, table settings, sports equipment, hats, shoes...)
• By size
• By shape

Those last two, size and shape, are efficient ways to sort things, especially in smaller storage spaces, because they make great use of space.  However, it should be noted that such labels may be less helpful when it comes time to find an item later on.

Systemization

Once you’ve put in the hard work to assign every item a home of its own, now it’s time to give your storage area a system.  This one extra step will save you a headache at the end of the next school year when you walk into a prop room that is still in good shape.  A systemized storage plan tells you and your students precisely where everything can be found and more importantly, where it gets returned to throughout the year.  When students can easily tell where something should be returned to, everything will always — fingers crossed — be exactly where you expect to find it.

Systemize the storage area by labeling everything.  That includes the props and the containers they are stored in.  It also includes labeling each of the costumes and the place where they live on the costume racks.  Here are a few ways to go about this.

Storage Labels:  Each container should be clearly labeled.  Let’s go back to rule number 4:  Like items should be stored together.  Now, the final step is to label the container of similar items based on your system of categorization.  Next, label the prop inside as well, either in a discreet location on the prop itself, or at the very least, on the inventory list you have started.  This will ensure that everyone knows that the poisoned apple can always be found in the “Fairy Tale” prop box and that it should be returned to the “Fairy Tale” prop box once it is no longer needed for your current run of Snow White.

Color Coding Costumes:  A great way to systemize the costume closet is with color coding.  Create color-coded sections on your costume racks so students can easily find where their costumes should be returned and stored.  For instance, costumes for royalty — kings, queens, princes and princesses — might be kept in the purple section.  Western gear for cowboys, maidens, farmhands and hillbillies might be in the green section.  Pin a small square of matching colored ribbon on each garment that belongs in that section.  Your costumes will never be out of place again, especially when you enforce rule number 3 about hangers!

Feel free to create your own coding system.  I like to use a letter and number coding system at times.  For shelves, you might label each shelf with a letter and divide the shelves into sections, identified by a number (A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, and so on...).  Label the box that goes in that spot on the shelves with the matching code.  That way, if you need to take the entire box of “Fairy Tale” props, you also know that it gets returned to the B3 location on the shelves.

By applying and maintaining the four rules of organization and rescuing your storage and costume areas with this S.O.S. Guide, you might never again have to face a storage room disaster at the end of a year!