Essential Tips for Mastering Home Organization
In partnership with S & S Cabinets & Closets
A well-organized home doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a little effort and a game plan.
If your home could use an organizational do-over, here are a few suggestions to get you started:
De-Clutter The Kitchen
Bring Order to The Pantry
Create a Game Plan for The Living Room
Tackle The Garage
Modernize The Office
Home Organization Begins in The Kitchen
You gotta start somewhere, and as the room that’s most vulnerable to the ravages of clutter, the kitchen is as good a place to start as any. Many say that it's the most important room in a house so there is perhaps no other place where good organizational practices hold such importance.
As with the rest of the home, you can’t start reorganizing the kitchen until you clear out the clutter. Since a good purge will help simplify everything, rummage through your cabinets and drawers and throw out anything that’s broken or seldom used.
Once everything is pulled out of a section of your kitchen, you can get a good look at what’s remaining to determine where and how it should be stored. Abby Lawson of Just a Girl and Her Blog has assembled a step-by-step process that will help you split up the big job of kitchen organizing into a more manageable list of smaller jobs.
Fix Up The Pantry
Most kitchen pantries don’t get the love they deserve. Your pantry is responsible for assembling up to three meals per day, per resident. Make your life a whole lot easier by making sure everything is in its proper place.
Are all the items in your pantry fresh? Are you sure? Too often, spices and grains are put in the pantry and then forgotten. By the time you need them, they won’t have the flavor or health benefits you can only get with fresh ingredients. Go through your pantry and remove expired items.
If you're unsure about a spice, crush some of it in your hand. If it's no longer emitting a strong scent, throw it away. Unexpired canned and jarred items can remain, but if you don’t know when you purchased dry goods or spices, they should probably be tossed.
You’ll get more life out of items such as flour, oatmeal, pasta, and cereals if you remove them from their packaging and store them in labeled, airtight, plastic or glass containers. Store the containers according to their category (flour in one area, sugar in another, etc.) and label and date them so they’ll be easier to locate when needed.
You can keep better track of smaller packages by separating them into different groups and storing in assigned bins. Salty treats like chips and pretzels can go into one bin, while candies go in another and so on. Seasonal bins (gingerbread ingredients, for example) should be placed up and out of the way, while bins with popular, kid-friendly items can be kept in easy-to-reach areas.
Managing The Living Room
Of all the rooms in the house, the living room is the one where you should be able to free your mind and relax. You shouldn't have to navigate through dog toys and roller skates just to reach the couch. The place where your family watches TV and takes well-earned naps may be the biggest room, but organizing it can be simple if you’ve got a plan.
Your living room will look cleaner and more orderly if you designate different zones for different categories of items. If you have young children, keep their toys in a unit dedicated to that purpose. Do you have a gaming system? Keep the controllers and game boxes in a drawer or bin so they can be easily put away when not in use.
Some types of storage are well suited for the living room. Well-stocked bookcases, for instance, are both functional and attractive. Musical instruments are works of art on their own and, if on display, offer the opportunity for impromptu jam sessions.
Don’t Fear The Garage
Garages can be spooky places. If left to their own devices, they can become repositories for old golf clubs, disassembled cardboard boxes, and black widow social gatherings. There’s no reason to live in terror of your garage. By turning it into an organized storage and workspace, you can reclaim what is rightly yours and send those spiders packing!
Cleaning the garage is not nearly as unmanageable as it may seem. Since it's usually the last refuge for things you don’t have the heart to throw away, a good purge can accomplish a lot. After you’ve rid yourself of all the stuff you don’t need, there are numerous options available for storage.
Slatwall racks offer a ton of room for anything from gardening tools to sports equipment. There’s also usually plenty of room overhead for storing seasonal gear and flat items like ladders. Because garages aren’t required to look stylish, there are lots of ways to store your things in an attractive and orderly manner.
An Efficient Workspace
If you have a home office — or a separate part of another room reserved for office work — you’ll want it as clear and easy to navigate as the in-office variety. The good news is your home office doesn’t have to look like an “office."
With so many people working from home, many have developed designs for things like desktop organizers and file drawers that are both utilitarian and stylish. Because traditional offices rely so much on paperwork, even the work you do at home can fall victim to overwhelming and unnecessary clutter.
There is an easy fix to this dilemma: go paperless! Yes, the dream of the paperless office is as old as the first IBM supercomputer, but if you haven’t made the move to a digital office space, now’s your chance to join the 21st century. No less an authority than Martha Stewart recommends moving documents into the digital age with the help of a hand scanner for quickly scanning receipts.
Conclusion
Reorganizing your home doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Treat each room as its own separate job, and then divide each job into several small tasks. When you’re ready to do some housework, you can either tackle one task at a time or several in a day. Never feel like you have to bite off more than you can chew.
To avoid big home reorganizing jobs in the future, you just have to stick to a regular cleaning schedule. Once your items are stored in a way that’s easy to remember and maintain, keeping your home well-organized will take far less time and effort than wading through the cluttered home of yore!
