Organize Your Home...or Else!

Do you walk into your house feeling like it’s a war zone of some sort? With clutter all over the place you can barely remember what your living room looks like without all the mess. You try picking up the bits and pieces of tumbled down furniture, broken toys, mismatched items of clothing, and even remnants of last night’s pizza and yet you seem to have lost the garbage can in the middle of the heap! Don’t worry, maybe its just time for you to call a ceasefire. It’s never too late to organize your home around you and put your life back in order!

First things first, you need to pick a plan or routine that will be perfect for you. Organizing is one thing, but keeping things organized on a daily basis is a whole new ball game. This is where most people fail. Miserably. So even if you have innumerable storage containers in all conceivable shapes and sizes, if you’re not using these regularly, you’d still find yourself stuck inside your living room jungle from time to time. Order a family meeting to try and involve other members in your organizing scheme. Try out a couple of routines such as 15-minute clean ups before bedtime or delegating "dirty" work to each member of the family. Find out some ideas that work for your lifestyle!

Once you’ve planned a system, its now time to decide on the storage devices to use. They should be something you really dig, or else you’ll end up hating the mere act of putting things away! Look for something that can go long-term, say 5 or 6 years. This way you won’t have to host an annual storage bin changing ceremony…. A popular item for storage is the ever endearing wicker basket! They come in many sizes and colors and match almost any decorating theme too. To help with identifying where all the stuff was put, you can attach a cute hand-written note and use these as tags for your wicker baskets. Transparent jars also make for great storage items. Items such as coins, small toys, pencils and pens as well as marbles can be kept from hiding elsewhere yet you can easily find them when you have to since the jars are see-through! These smart storage accessories can even be used as nice paper weights on your desk or table tops.

If you’re the kind of person who hates the task of sorting through tons of mail then I don’t really blame you. With a minimum of about 4 mails for each person in your house any given day, it’s no wonder you find no enjoyment in seeing that postman at your doorstep.

You might need an organizer so that it would be easier to spot bills from love letters and insurance notes. Folders, letter trays and other containers of this kind would be very helpful if you want to go over your mail quickly. Before the week is over you can sort through all of these letters again to answer invitations, pay bills and the like. You may even assign a container for each member, this way he/she can sort the mails alone. By doing this you will lessen the incidence of lost letters, dog-eaten flyers or toilet-flushed grades! It will also be very practical to tend to your important mails early in the week.

You should have a trial week for all the tips I just shared with you. Before the week is over you’ll be wondering why it took you so long to call that ceasefire on chaos. After you shop for groceries, immediately put them away in the proper containers or cabinets. Don’t wait before cleaning up a mess. To get kids involved, give them specific tasks and offer rewards after. Strike up a little healthy competition between siblings as to who can finish a task faster! You’ll be surprised at the ease by which you can actually maintain the organization of your home!