Organizing You Home

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Organizing your Home

Isn’t it amazing how many items you have around the house? You don’t realise how much you have accumulated over the years until, all of a sudden, you can’t live with it any more. Life in general has you picking up so much extra stuff, that, at some stage, you have to make a decision to weed out the unecessary items and start organizing your home.

When you first move into your home it seems like you have so much space.  It’s exciting planning where to put things and having a place for everything. But then – Life gets busy. Lifestyles change for varying reasons and your possessions accumulate. As the years pass, you might find yourself becoming a pack rat.

If you find that you are now in this zone, read on….

Organizing your home…

…is a step-by-step process.

It will take more than a day or even a week to get everything to a manageable level, but once you do, staying organized is an easier task.  If you have a family, enlist their help.  They can pitch in and learn a thing or two about controlling clutter in their life. Get them to start with their own room.Then they can take ownership of and responsibility for their own belongings.

Please find below,a list of quick hints for organising your home.

1. Start with the high traffic areas.  The living room and kitchen are usually the two most used rooms in the house.  Everything gets dropped on a counter or the couch in these two places.  Concentrate on getting everything set up the way that you like it before moving on to another room.

2. Use storage containers.  Over the years, the style of storage containers has upgraded to be pretty as well as functional.  Instead of storing containers in stacks in the garage, purchase ones that match your décor in each room and integrate them so that no one would even notice they were being used for storage.

3. Divide items into categories.  You can use heavy duty trash bags for this part.  Everything that you find can go into a pile: KEEP, THROW AWAY, GIVE AWAY, and RELOCATE.  Items that will stay in that room are to keep.  Things that you don’t need or are broken can be thrown away.  Clothes or furniture still in great condition can be donated and scheduled for pickup by local charities.  Anything that definitely belongs in another room can be labeled for relocation when you get to that room.This is a great way of organizing your home.You will create a mess but it will be organized chaos whilst in progress. Once everything in that room is labelled, then it can easily be moved to the designated area.

4. Remove everything from drawers and cabinets.  This is a time-consuming process but it is easier to start with an empty space and fill it instead of simply pushing things around.  If you line things up on the counter, someone else can help by putting the items in some type of order.

5. Make use of all of your available space.  In the kitchen, for example, appliances or extra containers can be stored on top of the cabinets provided they don’t extend all the way to the ceiling.  That’s extra storage space without benefit of a storage container.  Also use the top of the refrigerator for cereal boxes and breakfast food. In the bedroom, shoes and winter clothes can go into flat storage bins that slide easily under the bed or the dresser.

6. Label your containers.  Use tape and a permanent marker to identify the contents of your storage containers.  Avoid writing on the actual container in case they are reused and the contents are changed.  Labeling also makes for easy identification if you decide to sell or give away a container of books or something.  You won’t have to open each container to locate them.

Organizing your home….

…takes time.

But, once it is done and you get back into the habit of returning everything you use to its proper place, organizing your home will not become such a monumental task.

If you find this article useful, please share it and write a comment with some extra ideas.