Organizing Home Tips

People have been doing spring cleaning for a very long time. Over 7,000 years, to be exact. When the spring is here, most of us start feeling to need to clean and throw out things. If you live in the north, spring cleaning is a must. We insulate our houses during the winter to prevent heat loss and to save energy. Most windows haven’t been opened since last fall. Now it’s time to open all your windows and clean them inside and outside.

If you haven’t started your spring cleaning, now it’s time. Make a plan and stick to it. Start with opening all windows first and work your way up. Spring cleaning is not a one day project, you need to reserve a few weekends to do a thorough cleaning. First clean the inside of your windows and doors and any glass surface. Don’t forget the mirrors. Then pick a nice weather day to clean the outside windows.

Once you’re done with that, clean the living room and kitchen. Shampoo the rugs and wipe clean the furniture. Throw out outdated cans and boxes in the kitchen and clean up your pantry. Don’t forget the range and refrigerator.

If you read organizing blogs you probably are a very organized person who has done most of the cleaning and organization before the holidays. Now life is normal again, some of us are in the mood to clean again. There’s one place that many people tend to ignore and find it challenging to organize – the entryway. It’s so often ignored and yet so important in our everyday lives.

Some people call it mud room, entryway, or hallway. However you call it, it’s often messy and unorganized. A neat and tidy entryway says so much about you and makes life so much easier and functional. If you have a closet already, you’re in luck. Simply clean out the closet and install a shoe rack and you’re ready to go. Coats should always be hanging on the hangers, not on the doors. Be sure to leave rooms for bags, schoolbags, hats, and gloves. If you don’t have a closet, a simple shelf, coat hanger, and shoe rack will do.

Unless you’re a hoarder, most of us like to see our house clean and organized. But the thought of spending a whole weekend or more to clean and organize simply stresses us out. We tend to keep it off until we have to. Then more things would have piled up. If you reserve 20 minutes a day for the next ten days and make a plan to clean up room by room and closet by closet. The task will seem less stressful.

If you have guests that are coming in a month, now it’s a good time to start. We tend to get disorganized during holidays and get overwhelmed with the gifts, wrapping papers, and the shopping itself. Why not start organizing and cleaning now so you don’t have to spend the weekend right before Christmas to clean. Make a plan and stick to it. The best place to start is the kitchen. That’s where you will spend most of your time. Clean out the outdated cans and jars. And get a shelf organizer if you don’t already have one. Organize your spices and oils.

One of the messiest place in your kitchen besides the refrigerator is probably the pantry. Most of us have so many cans, boxes, spice jars, plastic containers without lids that we simply can’t remember what we have. We tend to purchase duplicates since we can’t find anything. If you open your pantry and have to dig for things, it’s about time to clean out the pantry.

Do you know that spices have shelf life also? Expired spices need to go. Outdated cans and jars need to be thrown out and reorganized. Once you throw out the outdated and expired items, the shelves will look better and cleaner right away. Then you can organize the remaining items by expiring dates and  contents.

Any containers that don’t have lids can be thrown out also. You don’t need forty plastic containers with mismatched lids. Use small boxes to sort out small items and label the boxes so everyone in the family knows what is inside the boxes.

By now, most of us have put away our summer clothes and took winter jackets, coats, and sweaters from the storage. I find it the easiest to store seasonal clothes in the plastic containers. They’re durable and air tight so you can put them in the basement or the attic. Next year when you take the clothes out, they won’t smell damp or wet. You can purchase several medium to large sizes and market each one for each family member. Get enough moth balls if you’re going to store wool clothes. Many people keep their seasonal clothing in the closet or underneath the bed, doing so just creates clutter in the house. It’s best to store them in the basement. You can even stack them up or build shelves to place them.

Home organization really is about keeping clutter out. Once you separate seasonal clothing, you’ll find more space in the closets and find things easily. Many working women simply don’t have the time energy to put stuff away during the season change. The good news is that, if you get the containers and do it one season, you’ll find it easier to do next year. One Saturday afternoon is enough to get it done.

When it comes to wardrobe cleanup, less is more. How many times you stand in front of your closet and wonder what to wear? For most of us, our closet is always full of stuff and yet we can’t find anything to wear. If you want to have an organized closet and have just the right outfit to wear, you have to do a wardrobe cleanup. Fall is the perfect time since you have to dig out the winter clothes anyway. I would do it this weekend. Take out everything from your closet and the stored winter clothes. Put everything on the bed, don’t forget to leave enough room on the floor for throwout and donation.

Have a friend who has good fashion taste over. First start with the summer clothes. Since you’ll probably add a few new items when spring comes, there’s no need to keep all your summer clothes. Throw out the stained, beyond repair, no-long-fit, outdated t-shirts, dresses out and leave them in the piles on the floor. Then go through your fall wardrobe and do the same. Keep in mind that most of us wear 80% of our clothes 20% of the time, so it’s safe to let go 50% of our clothes.

I understand that it’s difficult to let go some items. They might not fit, or look terrible on you, but you paid a price for it. These are the items that you should donate. We buy a lot of our clothes with impulse and the result is a nonfunctional wardrobe.  The bottom line for throwing out is anything that you haven’t worn in the last two years. It’s pretty safe that you’re never going to wear them. You can start weeding out 20% of your items and then do it again in a few weeks if you can’t let it go the first time around.

Once the first step is done, you can put the keep item back to the closet. Categorize your outfits by color and function so it’s easy to find anything in the morning.

We all heard of the saying less is more. But we don’t live by it when it comes to clothes. We buy when there’s a sale going on, when we feel like shopping, when we’re bored, or when we got dumped. The truth is that few of us even wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time. How many of us stay in front of the closet every morning and wonder what to wear? If you’re motivated to organize and stay organized, and to have a perfect wardrobe, be prepared to toss out a lot of clothes.

I learned an effective way to do this is to plan a perfect wardrobe from scratch. Never mind what you already have. Pretend that you have zero item and want to build a perfect wardrobe. What would your ideal wardrobe be? Look online and check out the latest fashion on the high end retailers stores such as Bloomingdales and Nordstrom. I’m not saying that you have to buy, you’re only going to study. Then once you know the latest fashion you can come up with your own personal style. Write down the items you would like to have.

Then take a weekend and place all your clothes on the bed and see which ones are the closest to your ideal. Then leave out your old, outdated, discolored, and no longer fit items in a single donation pile. Keep in mind, you’re building a perfect wardrobe that you truly want. Not something you will settle. At the end, cross the ones that you already own on your piece of paper and find out what’s missing. You can gradually purchase the missing items one at a time. This way, when you feel like shopping again, you know what you’re looking for. Also if there’s a sales going on, you know what you need.

I have to confess that it’s extremely difficult to decide what to toss out and what to keep when it comes to closet organization. We all dream about this beautiful closet that we walk into every morning and find just what we want to wear for the day. But it’s hard to let go many items. I’ve found that it helps to try to imagine that you have zero item in your closet and you’re building a brand new wardrobe from scratch. It’s a fun exercise to play.

Place all your clothes on the bed and pretend that they don’t belong to you and you have to pay for them. Then pick out the ones you’d be willing to pay today and those are the ones to keep. Donate the rest. If you’re still not sure, sort out the ones in the donation pile and pick out the second tier ones.

The key to have a beautifully organized closet and well suited wardrobe is to toss out!

We all face the same situation: season changes. If you live in a climate that’s clearly seasonal, then it means you have to re-arrange your closet at least twice a year. Or you face a total chaos. Unless you have a walkin closet that’s as big as your bedroom, you probably have to organize it.

Summer is over. Let’s face it, the whole family’s summer dresses, shorts, t-shirts all have to be put away to leave room for the fall sweaters. It seems we never have enough space. From my experience, getting rid of stuff is the key. Why? Because we accumulate things. Most people buy a few new items for each season, so our space shrinks. The rule is, if you didn’t wear certain items in this summer, you probably won’t wear it next summer. So now it’s a perfect time to donate!

Whether you live in an apartment of a single house, on the things that people often ignore is the organization of their shoes in the entryway. If you normally enter the house through the garage, then there still should be a designated space for your shoes. It’s even more important in an apartment. Because of the limited space, you can choose a shoe rack and place it underneath the coat hangers. Don’t get the plastic cheap ones. Metal or wooden ones are a lot better.

Clean the shoe rack and the floor underneath regularly to keep the dusts off. You don’t want to have a muddy floor. Train your husbands and children to place their shoes on the rack when they come home. You can also place a mat or rug in front of the rack. Lowe’s carry several kinds of stackable shoes racks with matching entryway cabinets. If you invest one of those, it’ll make a huge difference to your house. Those cabinets are basically entry organizers that keep your purse, phones, backpacks, keys, shoes, coats, hats, and other things in order. Once you close the doors, they look like cabinets. But if that’s too big of an investment, then stick to a shoerack. It’ll be just as organized as a cabinet.