It’s easy to get frustrated by your home sometimes. Yes, it’s home, but all the stuff in it just seems to, well, pile up! Where does it all come from? Let’s get these 5 essential organizing tricks to reduce clutter down before the holidays.
Keeping your home clean and organized is a daily chore, especially with kiddos. But, knowing some tricks can cut down on some of your stress and frustration. We also had to learn a few tricks about keeping our schedule tight with our five girls having so many activities. Read more about that here.
Don’t Feel Bad Organizing is not easy
Professional Organizers spend all day, every day, organizing people’s homes, so it stands to reason they’d find some handy storage tricks and organizing tips for the rest of us. Here are some home organizing tips from the pros that we all might find useful!
Don’t Use Circles-One of the best essential organizing tricks
You know those circular wicker baskets you’ve got all over your house? Logically, they’re not very effective. Just because something is touted as a “storage bin” for organizing doesn’t mean it’s good. Square shapes naturally hold a wider variety of objects and can be stored and stacked more effectively than circle ones. So if you’ve got a ton of circular baskets, you might want to replace them with square shapes. They’ll hold more, and actually fit into your corners!
This one threw me for a loop as all you really see in stores are circular baskets for laundry storage solutions. Right? Wrong, I went to Home Goods, not a store I should stay in long but, they had so many square options and in all different colors. I ended up getting grey and white for our girl’s rooms. (Look for a room makeover post soon) They have lots of room decor that doubles as a storage option too.
Consider Every Space As Usable-
Sometimes this can mean thinking outside the box. If you really need a home office but you’re out of room, what about using a closet? Putting some French doors up and installing some wall shelving could turn this narrow space into a perfectly usable home office. And you’d have the added benefit of being able to shut it all away when you were done. Our lesson here? Get creative! This can be a very inexpensive, easy option.
This is so true for our household. I really feel like there is so much space we just don’t use. Right now my home office is in our room. I’ve, really put some effort into making it feel like a real workspace.
Still, I look at my bed and want to get into it. I could have totally used one of our closets as an office. Using small items to organize and mason jars to hold my tools as well as hanging things on the closet door to maximize the space.
Hide When You Have To-
If you need to have a filing cabinet downstairs but hate looking at it, then hide it! Buy a round glass top to go on top and then drape a tablecloth over it. Viola! Now you’ve got a pretty end table AND a filing cabinet!
It’s my house and I can put stuff where I want. Ha! Decluttering and organizing really takes time. You have to really look at your space and come up with storage ideas. I had to use our garage for file folders, holding closed real estate deals. We worked out a filling system and organing ideas, the garage space really worked for us.
Use Color For Easy ID-
You know how every season Target comes out with colored bins? Red and Green at Christmas, orange at Halloween, pastel at Easter, and so on. Well, hop on their bandwagon! Buying a bin in these colors can help you organize that season’s decorations. You won’t have to label and you’ll know by looking which season you’re trying to find.
Color-coded organizing in our house is a must. Every daughter has their own color. This was really based on our calendar, knowing who is where and when worked better when each child had a color. That idea just easily transitioned into our home life. Here is a list of some of the things we color code as essential organizing tricks:
- Charge Cords: This seems weird but when each of your children has electronics its a lifesaver. (they still fight over them)
- Toiletry Bags: Each of our girls own bags with essential daily hygiene items in it. This also sounds weird but our girls were constantly moving the deodorant and a plethora of other things. #thatwasnotfun
- Cases: They also have color-coded phone and tablet cases. ( we do lots of road trips and this was a must. They also have to have Ipads for school and we wanted it to be easy for them to grab and go.
We Got This
I know there are so many things that you want to organize but, take your time and do it the right way. Plan well and your storage space will look amazing when you’re done. Organizing the grocery bags, kitchen cabinets and the pantry made me feel accomplished. Please share some essential organizing tricks you come up with.
Think About Your Space, And How You Use It- This trick might go without saying, but it will behoove us to bring it up just in case. The stuff you use most should be within easy reach so you can get to it quickly. Things that you don’t use that often should be way up high, way down low, or packed away. Be brutal when you start to declutter your things! If you can’t get rid of it, then put it where it belongs- immediate, high, or low. The less “stuff” you have out in your home, the bigger and calmer it will look.
Good luck, and happy organizing!
Some other cool ideas: A parent command center here
Purposely
The All Purpose Woman
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