SOUL Sanctuary: Home Organization Tips
First…A Real Quick SOUL Meditation to Get You Started!
Organization Hacks for the Messiest Places in Your Home
When your home isn’t organized, you waste a lot of time looking for things that you need. You can also end up wasting money because when you can’t find something you know you must have already purchased, you just end up going to get it again.
Not only that, but being disorganized can cause you to feel stressed out. You can’t prevent having to keep some things in your life, such as important paperwork, things you need for the car and things you need for a pet in case you have one.
But you can prevent the disorganization that happens all too easily in every room in your home. Let’s go room by room and look at how to best organize the clutter and keep your things (and your sanity) intact!
Keeping Your Living Room Company Ready
Don’t you hate it when someone stops by and you have to do a mad dash to straighten up? Too often, magazines are out of place, the television remotes are lying around and the kids’ video game console and the games seem to be everywhere.
With some quick and easy organization, not only can you make your living room always look company ready, but you’ll be able to easily find what you need when you need it.
Clutter can happen so easily in a living room and it only takes a matter of seconds for everything to look disorganized. But fortunately, there are some great organizational tools that you can buy to keep your living room looking good.
- You want to make sure that you have plenty of storage options for this room because clutter always seems to end up in the living room. Some good storage options that double as furniture are ottomans and storage benches.
- You get the option of seating as well as storage. You can use these to quickly stash a comforter, kids’ games and toys and any little item that’s lying around. You can find a great deal for your money with something like the Convenience Concepts Sheridan faux leather storage bench because this one comes with two side ottomans.
- So you get a lot of organizing space there. Lift stop storage benches like the ones made by Homelegance are great, too. You not only get seating and storage, but the bench looks like leather so it’s quite beautiful.
- Bookshelves are a must have for keeping your living room organized. You can find bookshelves that hang freely with decorative supports or you can find horizontal or vertical ones that sit on the floor.
- One of these kind, a 5-Shelf Bookcase, gives you a lot of room to keep your books within reach while keeping them neat.
- You can also find shelves that tuck into corners, which helps you save space and will keep your knick knacks organized. If you have a collection of movies, you’re going to want furniture that will help keep your movies neatly arranged.
- Sometimes these entertainment centers will have built in places for your television or stereo remotes, but not always. If you’re like a lot of people and find yourself constantly searching for your remotes, getting organized in this area can save you a lot of hassle.
- A Remote Control Spinning Caddy helps you keep up with your remotes and keeps your coffee table or side table organized. Now if only you can train your family to put them back in the caddy so they don’t get lost!
- If you have a subscription to magazines, newspapers or like to pick them up from the store, you’ll want something that will keep them neat until you’ve finished going through them.
- You can find this by getting a magazine holder. You can find these in wood, bamboo, basket style or metal.
Organization Tips for the Kitchen
Staying organized in the kitchen keeps things neat, but it also cuts down on your preparation as well as your cleanup time. One of the biggest organizing helps for this room in the house is the kitchen island. This is helpful for preparing foods for meals or for spending some time in the morning with a cup of coffee and the newspaper when you first wakeup. But it’s also a great place to keep your cookbooks organized because it has the shelving for those.
It also has utility drawers so you can put some extra dishtowels or cloths or you can use them for those kitchen utensils that seem to take up more space in the regular drawers connected to your cabinets.
- One of the biggest things in a kitchen that can cause disorganization are the pots and pans. The reason for this is because it’s easy to find yourself too tired after your day to put things back exactly where they go in the cabinet.
- So what happens is people end up opening the cabinet door and just shoving a pot or pan inside. Then, when you need one of them, you have to dig through the jumbled mound and usually end up spilling them onto your kitchen floor.
- This is why a pot and pan rack is extremely helpful. You can get them that mount on a wall, but if you want to save more space, it’s best to choose one that hangs from the ceiling like the Gift Warehouse 35603 Hanging Iron Pot Rack.
- With this one, the pots sit on top and the pans hang down. This is one of the popular models because it has beautiful scrollwork as well as being functional.
Another big area that can really get disorganized is the kitchen pantry. - The reason for this is because most home pantries are not big enough for a family. If you have a large family, it’s even more difficult. This is where an extra pantry like the Nantucket Pantry Distressed Finish comes in handy.
- It has adjustable shelves for those items that are too tall for regular spaced shelves and it has nice brushed nickel hardware. One thing that’s helpful in a pantry is using stackable containers instead of bulky boxes or wide bags.
- You can simply pour the food into containers. This is really helpful for staying organized with cereals. One set that’s pretty popular is the Rubbermaid Premier Food Storage Container Set.
- Other items that can help keep you organized in the kitchen are things such as coffee cup hooks, soda or wine racks, silverware organizers and bread or fruit baskets.
Bedroom Organizing Solutions
Your bedroom is supposed to be your haven – the place where you rest and recharge from your day. But too many people allow their bedroom to become kind of the catch-all room.
It’s the holding place for laundry, bills and all sorts of things that migrate that way. Drawers inside a dresser can easily become like a junk drawer because it’s so easy to just toss whatever in there.
You can keep your dresser drawers organized by using something like South Shore Drawer Organizers, which give you a total of five organizers per set. A lot of bedrooms lack items which help keep things organized and this is why this can easily become the messiest room in the house.
But you can cut down on that by buying a Modular 5-in-1 Shelf Cube Storage System. These systems keep clutter and disorganization at bay because it’s the system that works with your unique preference instead of being a one size fits all kind of system.
- You can put these in any combination that you want. They can be used for clothing, shoes, children’s toys, books or whatever you’d like to keep organized. Now in a child’s bedroom, there are two things that cause disorganization and messes.
- Those are toys and stuffed animals. Either can make a child’s room look overcrowded and unkempt. But using things like toy boxes, kids organizational shelving or stuffed animal hammocks can cut down on this kind of disorganization.
- To keep toys neatly organized, you want to look at buying something such as a Bookcase Storage Chest because you not only get room for toys, but for books as well.
- For teenagers, who go into a stage where everything gets thrown wherever it happens to land, you might want to look at beds that have storage drawers beneath them and bookshelves on the end.
Organizing Tools for the Bathroom
The bathroom serves a lot of functions. You shower there, some people change their clothes in a bathroom and a lot of people style and also trim their hair and do personal grooming.
It’s one of the most often used rooms for putting on makeup. The bathroom is also where some people keep cleaning supplies and store their towels and washcloths.
For all of these activities, you need a way to keep what you need to use organized. Shelves are good for storing baskets with hair dryers, curling irons, towels and more.
- One great shelf that’s the right size for bathrooms is a 4-Tier Shelf. It has wider shelves so it’s able to hold storage baskets to keep small things like makeup to large things like towels neatly organized.
- Bathroom counters always get so disorganized and catch so much clutter. One of the reasons for this is because not many homes have medicine cabinets like they used to have and this is where people used to store certain items.
- Organizers to hold things like your toothpaste, toothbrushes and other dental items can keep the clutter to a minimal. InterDesign Med+ Caddies are good caddies for just that purpose.
- Styling products can be kept organized in the Style Away Organizer where you can store things like hair dryer, curling iron, and other odds and ends for the bathroom.
- Something else that can help keep you organized and save you time is to have the kind of bathroom hamper that allows you to go ahead and sort your dirty laundry.
- You can usually find these as linen baskets in pairs or in triples that let you sort clothes from towels as well as keeps your whites separate. You can find large baskets for a large family or smaller ones for individuals and couples.
Mud Room Organizational Help
If you have a mud room, then you know just how quickly this area can look like a mess. As an entry point into your home, this space often gathers a lot of stuff and that stuff is usually disorganized.
That old saying “everything in its place” is never more needed than in a mud room. A necessity for a mud room is a bench where people can sit to take off their shoes – yet it has room underneath it for storing the shoes or other items.
- Some benches are big enough for boots as well. You can get a Wooden Shoe Bench, which is a simple bench which has shoe room beneath it or you can get the kind that has cubby holes like the Winsome Townsend Bench with Cushion.
- The reason that some people get this kind is because they use the cubby holes to store their children’s backpacks for school so that everything is neatly in one place.
- This helps you keep all of their stuff organized and together so that you’re avoiding those mornings of having to scramble to find their things so they can make it to school on time.
- You also want to make sure that you have a coat rack of some type. This can be used for keeping coats, sweaters, raincoats or scarves organized. Some people use these to hold their children’s backpacks.
- You can get something simple or elaborate. You might also want to think about getting an umbrella stand. This will keep your umbrellas organized and handy for when you’re ready to leave the house and notice it’s raining outside.
Taming the Closet Mess
We’ve all seen comedy shows where someone opens a closet door and gets hit with a barrage of items ranging from toys to skis to books. This is an area of the home where people open the door, shove something in and then forget about it.
Since closets are a feature in many rooms in the house, the disorganization can be pretty big. But there are a variety of items that you can get that will help you tame this clutter regardless of whichever room it’s in.
- You can buy closet doublers, which give you more room to hang clothing and you can buy tie racks, which mount onto the wall in the closet, are out of the way and yet keep all of your ties organized and ready.
- What most people need is more shelving and more closet drawers.
- Not having enough shoe space is a problem in many closets and you can double your shoe space by buying a few sets of Horizontal Laminate Closet Organizer for your footwear.
- You can use a customization organizer such as a starter kit that keeps all of your hanging clothes as well as folded clothes organized.
- There are also hanging shelf organizers that you can use, but these do tend to cut into the space that you have available for hanging your clothes. Complete systems are what are most popular and while these do run a little more cost-wise, they pay off in the long run.
- Closet Shelving Systems add organization and beauty to your closet. Plus, good quality closet organizers add to the resale value of your home.
Organizing your home shouldn’t be overly expensive and it shouldn’t create more frustration for you. Invest in some affordable, easy-to-use tools and watch your home transform from chaos to calm in an instant!
