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New year organizing starts at your entryway

admin — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:38:37 +0000

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.

Reserve 20 minutes every day to clean up your house

admin — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:50:35 +0000

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 Clean out the outdated cans and jars.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.

Clean out your pantry

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:08:03 +0000

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.

Plastic Boxes are your friends when it comes to store seasonal clothing

admin — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:05:08 +0000

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.

Less is more when it comes to wardrobe cleanup

admin — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:02:11 +0000

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.

Shoes racks are a must in the entryways

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 01:29:07 +0000

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.

Some people hoard more than others

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:20:09 +0000

I was reading the news and found some hoarding stories of people who literally buried themselves alive. I’m a clean and organized freak, it effects me psychologically just watching these videos. It is our human nature that we want to hoard things, food and others. It’s part of animal nature and that’s what got our ancestors through winters. But hoarding junks is plain wrong.

The most important lesson that we can learn is that how much we take in and how much we leave out. Boxes and more boxes. Boxes, containers, and shelves are the our best friends when it comes to organizing. When you come home from outside, whether school, work, grocery shopping, or any shopping trip. Put the stuff away immediately. Put them away even if you’re tired. Putting it off will cause trouble later on.

Day four of decluttering: Go through your husband’s and children’s closet

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:42:26 +0000

If you and your husband have separate closets, today’s is the day to go through his stuff and your kids’ clothes. It’s much harder to clean a husband’s closet. My rule is to only donate and throw out worn, torn, and rags. He will probably want to keep that old college sweat shirt of his even though you hate it. So the best way to do it is to get rid of clothes that are absolutely rags. Then put the ones in question mark in a bad and let him sort out on his own. If you’re lucky, he might decide to get rid of them for good.

For kids’ closet, if your kids are young, then you’re in luck. Donate and outgrown ones and if you want to keep some cute outfits for sentimental reason, put them in a space saver bag or a plastic container. You can put them in the basement of attic for storage.

Once you figure out what to keep, get nice hangers and arrange them by colors and seasons. You don’t really need to invest a lot to get a custom closets for children’s rooms. But simple shelves in the closets do magic in space savings.

Put off season clothes in plastic containers and store them underneath the bed. It’s easy to get them and it saves closet space.

Day two of decluttering your house and closets

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:10:19 +0000

This is the hard working day. Make sure no kids are around. Try to save 5-6 hours uninterrupted. Start with anything that’s on the floors, tables, and counters. Pick them up room by room. Toss out unwanted items and put them in the garbage bag. Save the ones that you need in the plastic bins. This will take you 2 hours depending on how messy your house is.

Next step, go though your drawers in the kitchen, home office, and bedrooms. Toss out and keep. This will take you the rest of the day. Organize items by bins and mark them using the marker.

The most important part of the day is to clean and declutter. Remember the main reason the house is messy is because you saved too much stuff. So please don’t feel obligated to save. Don’t touch the paperwork such as bank statements, bills yet, just put them in a large plastic bin. You will sort them out later on.

My house is a mess and I don’t have any room in my closets

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:32:09 +0000

How many of us feel the same way? Our coffee tables are full of books, magazines, paper cups, and everything else. There are socks underneath the beds and we don’t even dare to open the closet doors. If you have been fed up by the mess in your house. It’s time to take action!

Sometimes it’s harder to get started when there seems to be so much stuff to do. But you can do it! You don’t need to hire a professional organizer. That’s true, you can do it all yourself. Just make sure the children are not around and husband is at work. Give yourself 5 uninterrupted hours to clean, sort, dump, and organize. Then do the same the next day, and the next day…

Day one: this is not your cleaning day, but a day of preparation.

Get yourself half dozen contractor sized garbage bags
Markers
4-6 Plastic bins (large)
Cleaning supplies
Shoe organizers if you don’t already have them (plastic or metal)
Nice hangers
Storage bags