Getting Your Home Organized

A home by nature is full of life and full of living. But with living comes side effects such as mess, disorganization and chaos. Houses full of friends and families and pets are what we all aspire to have, but they bring with them a lot of stuff. And that stuff ends up everywhere.

We’ve come up with some great tips for home and garage organization when you need to bring things back in line a little.

1. Tackle one room at a time

Many people catch a sorting bug and pull things out of wardrobes and cupboards in every room of the house. This will very easily overwhelm you and you’ll give up before you even start. Take it one room at a time, but try to sort one room each weekend so that space is packed up again for the following week’s regular activities.

2. Sort things into 5 groups

Everything should go into one of the following piles:

• Things to keep
• Things to throw away
• Things to fix/mend
• Things to put away into storage for another season
• Things to sell/donate

The important thing once you’ve created these piles is that you don’t then just ignore them for six months while they collect dust; you actually action each pile until they are out of sight again. You will find that you’ve greatly reduced the amount of items you have to put back in the cupboard now and will actually be able to create some form of organization with what is left.

3. Get things off the floor

You have so much organization space that you are not utilizing. There is all this space above the ground that is going to waste. One common problem people have is that many items are used often, and therefore need to be accessible. These things are less likely to go away in their designated cupboard, but sit on the floor in someone’s way. Think of your garage storage; think of the vacuum cleaner, the kid’s hockey sticks or skateboards, the oddly shaped gym equipment. These all take up valuable real estate on the floor when you could be making better use of the space above.

4. Be flexible

Your life has changed many times since you first bought your house, and it will change many times to come. That skateboard your son loved will be quickly changed for a mountain bike; the gym equipment will be replaced by some other equally odd but differently shaped piece of gym equipment. Your home organization and garage storage ideas have to be flexible; if you build shelves or racks exactly for some things, this will look fantastic for a few months, and then you’ll have new things that don’t fit on the shelves. And you can’t put them on the floor because that’s where the vacuum cleaner is, and the upright fan, and the camping equipment and so on.

5. Be economical and be creative

There are some amazing new organization ideas coming into the market. And you can make small changes to your home that are inexpensive and quick and easy, that will make big changes to how your home looks and feels. Invest in items like the Kuvu and you’ll be surprised how many different ways you can use them, and by how easy they are to use over and over again. You’ll never believe how fun home organization can be.