Tips For Organizing The Home

Organizing the home means creating a space for absolutely everything in your home. You've heard the phrase, "a place for everything and everything in its place", right?

When we are surrounded by clutter, we are inevitably spending more time than we should trying to re-claim our home from the clutter or by constantly re-locating the clutter to another area simply to make room for things such as cooking, eating, or relaxing.

Organizing your home will help you to simplify your life, enable you to spend more time with the people you love, and spend more time actively pursuing the activities that you thoroughly enjoy.

Schedule a time, right now, to organize just one room of your house. Start small if you like, but schedule time for organization just like you schedule the rest of the activities in your life. It's important for your health and for your relationships, so make it a priority.

What do you need to organize? The answer is every room of your home. The more organized you are, the less time you spend worrying and stressing, which is good for everyone concerned, so don't become overwhelmed when you look around. Choose one space and tackle it. The rest will fall into place as you take time to organize each of your living spaces.

Organizing the Home In Creative Ways

• Purge, purge, purge. Give away, repurpose, or throw away anything you're not using regularly or no longer need.
• Invite friends and family to help you when organizing the home. More hands mean less work and more fun.
• Contain it! Use baskets, vintage suitcases, crocks, tins, cubbies, shelves, canisters, furniture, blanket chests, hatboxes, bins, and caddies to contain everything you have.
• Hang it up. Use decorative wall hooks, mounted pegs, pegboards, pot/pan racks, quilt racks, etc. to display, store, and organize your favorite items.
• Make the mudroom work for the entire family. Give each member of the family a basket or bin for their shoes, backpacks, sports equipment, outerwear, and umbrellas.
• Photo boxes can be used for photos, but so much more! Store receipts, children's toys, recipes, baseball cards, craft items, or blank cards and notes in these attractive boxes that come in just about every style, color and size.
• Stacking shelves can be used to stretch your storage space by a few inches or more than a foot. Use them in the kitchen, pantry, bathroom, garage, shed, basement, or child's room.
• Vintage trays display and contain jewelry, loose change, medications, or other small items.
• Jewelry is attractively stored on a vintage 3-tier dessert tray on the bedroom vanity or dresser. Repurpose a radiator grate (or buy one new at your local hardware store), frame it, and hang necklaces and earrings on it.
• Find an old mailbox at a garage sale or thrift store - paint it and then use it outside to store your child's sidewalk chalk, jump ropes, or bubbles.
• Create a family messaging and schedule center in a central room of the home. Include a large calendar, message board, note pads, pens and pencils, and the phone.
• Use rolling carts to store scrapbooking supplies, craft supplies, laundry detergents, and other items so they can be pulled out when needed, but otherwise rolled back into place and out of the way.
• Garages can be re-claimed for parking the car too. Use steel shelving to organize everything in the garage. Use the open beams above to store larger items. Hang bicycles from large hooks in the ceiling or beams during off-season months.
• Vintage coffee cans, pizza boxes, or other unconventional storage containers work well for small or unusually shaped items.
• Pass on magazines you've already read and no longer need. Trade magazines with a friend. The key is to keep the magazines from piling up in your home.
• Hooks or a basket for keys right inside the door will ensure keys won't be lost.
Organizing the home doesn't have to be a monumental task. Once you have a few things in place, it will become easier.
• Take five minutes a day to pick up items as you walk from one room to another.
• Make your bed each morning. Toss a load of laundry in each day. Plan the dinner menu for the next several days.
• Don't try to organize everything at once; rather do the organizing in small increments and you'll see the excellent results as you go.
• Seeing one area of your home organized and tidy will inspire you to tackle the next space, so don't lose heart.
• Just keep going when organizing the home, and take it one room at a time.