[Organizing It All Series] Part IV: Organizing Household Spaces

This is part four of a five-part series of posts on “Organizing It All!” Here, I will provide you with some useful tips and suggestions on how to deal with specific spaces in your home, managing and preventing clutter, and most of all… getting rid of it. Sometimes you need just a quick fix or an easy tip to get things going…If you missed out on previsions posts you can find a quick link here:
Part I, Part II, and Part III on our blog. Enjoy.

ORGANIZING SERIES
PART FOUR: Organizing Household Spaces. Keeping up on the day to day organizing can be difficult, and sometimes you just need a simple process to make the maintenance easier. Because each space functions differently, here are some easy tips and helpful reminders to consider when keeping your household organized:

Kitchen 

• Match all Tupperware containers and their tops, recycle all the mismatches.
• Sort into categories– baking, serving, food, coffee – only put back what you use and need. If you can get it for $20 in 20 minutes, move it on.
• Put one category away at a time. If you need plastic bins or other organizational products, this would be the time to get them. Clear only, make sure you label them.
• Foods, vitamins, medication, and spices – if it’s expired throw it out, except for medication-use this link for expired medication collection sites.
• Many times a tool can do double duty. You can use a vegetable peeler to hull strawberries, you don’t need two tools

Garages

• Everything that is outgrown, broken, and unused should go away.
• Everything else should be by zone– gardening, winter, summer, car stuff.

Bedrooms

• If it doesn’t fit, you don’t love it, it’s damaged or dated, you can be confident that you will not miss it. If you lose weight you are not likely to want to wear your old smaller clothes, come on you worked hard to lose weight.
• Books– if you aren’t going to read it again…really are you going to read it again? Donate it to your local library or a school in need depending on what it is.
• Papers belong in your office, not your bedroom.
• Old magazines…create a boundary, pick a timeframe- 2 months, 2 weeks…stick to it and your piles should stay minimal.

Bathrooms

• Old products that we purchased, used a few times, and decided we didn’t like it or were allergic to. They can all be donated to women’s shelters, they will certainly appreciate them.
• Extra towels– you usually need 2 or 3 per person and a set for guests. All raggedy unmatched towels can be turned into rags or donated to your local animal shelter

Family Room

• Clutter here usually is in the form of DVDs, VCR Anything that has been outgrown needs to get donated (Think Lady and the Tramp).
• Technology is moving so quickly and we can watch anything on FIOS, Amazon, and Netflix. Keep only what is really special to your family…
• Games and toys that are outgrown, broken, or missing pieces need to go away. Games that you no longer use should be donated, think

Our last post in this series will be on Paper Clutter…