10 Tips for an Organized Home

I love to keep things organized. Sometimes I'm a little OCD about it. I think you just feel better when your home is organized. So, here are my top 10 tips for keeping your home organized.

 (Thanks to a couple of my sweet sponsors for helping me create this list!)

1. Have a place for everything.
The first step to having an organized home is having a specific place for your things. It's important to be consistent with this so that everyone in the house knows where to find items when they're needed and where to put them when they're finished with them. You even want to make sure to have your medical supplies organized and handy like Erica from We Three Crabs shares in this post.

We created a space on the wall in our closet for our hats.

2. Put things back where they go when you're finished with them. 
This is the easiest way to keep your home organized. When you finish with something, don't leave it out. It takes a few seconds to put something back where it came from. (This tip was also shared by Cody from Catching Cody K)

My husband has trouble with this one as you can see by the shoes that clearly don't belong on the floor.

3. Clean out at least once a year.
Figure out a time of year that works best for you. I usually do this in the spring time. Whatever time you choose, at least once a year you need to go through each room in your house. As you go through, get rid of things you no longer need or use. Also, organize or reorganize the things you decide to keep.

You can read about how I cleaned out my closet and my pantry this past year. 

4. Create a meal menu and grocery shopping system.
To keep from buying food you don't need, create a menu of meals you want to make that week or month.

You can read more on how I plan my meals here. 

5. Keep your paperwork organized.
Families can accumulate a lot of paperwork. In my opinion, binders are the best way to organize papers. Erica from We Three Crabs wrote a great post on her family's binder. Right now we keep our important paperwork in an accordion file, but my plan is to organize it all in a binder soon. We also keep a binder for all our receipts we may need for tax purposes. We have it organized into different sections such as household items, school items, items I buy for work, etc.

6. Bins, boxes, and baskets are your friend.
It can be a little costly to get enough of these to begin with, but it's worth it. My suggestion is to buy a few at a time. Having things in bins, boxes, or baskets just makes your house look so much more organized and streamlined.

7. Do a little bit every day rather than trying to do it all in one day.
It's so easy to let housework pile up. Yet, this makes it harder to get it done. Rather than letting the housework pile up and trying to do it all in one day, create a cleaning schedule. Each day do a few things that need to get done. In my opinion, this also helps keep your house cleaner on a daily basis. (This tip was also shared by Cody from Catching Cody K.)

Wash dishes after cooking each meal to prevent dirty dishes piling up. I also have a certain day of the week when I wash clothes and when I put them up.

8. Keep a calendar.
Even in this day of advanced technology, I like to have some things down on paper. That includes my schedule. I keep a calendar on our refrigerator and I have a planner that I carry back and forth between home and work. It's easier to keep up with and remember things when they're right there in front of you. If you're a blogger, Cody from Catching Cody K highly recommends a calendar to keep up with your blog posts schedule and ideas.

9. Use items in unusual ways.
Be creative in your organization. A shoe box can be used to hold medicine bottles. A hanging shoe organizer makes a great organizer for a pantry or laundry room.  Utensil baskets can be turned into a spice rack. Think outside the box for cheap organization ideas.

10. Use labels and color coding.
I love putting labels on things-especially things that are in closed in boxes. It makes it so much easier to find what you're looking for without having to open everything up. Have things labeled also helps with tip #1 and #2. When things are labeled, they have a place and people know where to put them. Color coding is also a good organization system. I personally use color coding on my calendars. Different colors mean different types of events.

How do you keep your home organized? 

 

Cleaning Out the Closet

I have been very productive during my break! Yay me!

In case you missed it, I wrote about organizing my pantry the other day.

After the pantry, I moved on to our bedroom closet. 

Not only is this spring cleaning for me, but I'm also trying to work on reducing the excess in our lives. In the book, 7: an experimental mutiny against excess, one area that Jen Hatmaker focused on was clothes. 

While reading this chapter, I started to get a little prideful. As I've mentioned on here many times, I'm not a fashionable person. I might shop a couple of times a year. So, I thought to myself Clothes isn't a problem of mine! Then, I remembered that I have to rotate my clothes with the seasons because I don't have enough room in my closet for all my clothes. That was definitely humbling. Even I, someone who's not that interested in clothes, have excess clothes. 

A year ago, I did a MAJOR cleaning out of my clothes. I actually wrote a post about it, but my blog was really tiny and it has no comments (insert sad face), so I'd love for you to go read it as well over here.

My goal was to get rid of enough clothes so that I no longer have to rotate my clothes with the seasons. I also wanted to organize my closet. 

Here's all my clothes after I pulled them out of my closet and drawers. 

 

Here's our organized closet.

I bought these crates at Target. I use them to hold sweaters, tank tops, and some long sleeve tshirts.

I also got these bins at Target. I put our extra towels and sheets in them.

We already had the drawer thing. I bought the red container at Target to keep my extra bags in. The grey container holds my extra shoes. The black box in the corner houses our important paperwork.

I really like having a specific place for everything. It makes everything look so much neater.

Linking up here and here.

Cleaning Out the Pantry

Am I weird because I actually enjoy cleaning and organizing? 

I get 4 track outs a year and I usually spend time during each one giving our apartment a deep cleaning. I've also gotten into the habit of cleaning things out and getting rid of stuff during my March track out. 

This "cleaning out" is especially important to me this year. I read 7: an experimental mutiny against excess earlier this year and reviewed it here if you're interested. The point of reading this book was not to copy exactly what the Hatmaker family did. The point for me was to reiterate just how blessed I truly am and to fight our materialistic and self-seeking culture. 

Now, some of you may be like me and think "I don't have that much stuff." But if we think about how much we have in comparison to the majority of the world, we're rich.

I decided to start my apartment overhaul by cleaning out my pantry. I have really been feeling like I need to change how I eat. I eat such unhealthy food and I also eat more than I should. It's become a bad habit that I need to break. As I show you my organized pantry, I'll explain how I hope it will help my eating habits as well. 

I doubt that many of you reading this have ever wondered where your next meal is coming from. I know that I never have. I grew up with a full pantry, refrigerator, deep freezer, cabinets, and a grocery store 10 minutes down the road. This habit of keeping the pantry stocked has continued now that I have a place of my own. Food is easily accessible in my own apartment and down the road in multiple directions. Why does my pantry need to be full while so many around the world barely get one meal a day? Why are people all around the world starving to death while I have the opposite problem-I'm gaining weight?! This isn't right. 

*   *   *

I started by taking everything out of the pantry and of course, I forgot to take a "before" picture.

Side note-since February is a short month, we didn't make a big grocery shopping trip. We bought little things here and there that we needed. My hope was for us to eat some of the things that had been in the fridge and pantry for a while. So, this is what "we have nothing to eat" looks like: 

Here's what my organized pantry looks like:

I've had this shoe organizer in the pantry for a while now. All that stuff used to be on the floor of the pantry and it drove me crazy! I thought this was a simple and cheap way to get it off the floor.

This is the top shelf. I have my box meals (mainly my "Doomsday Preppers" stash of Hamburger Helper) in the back. Then I have pasta, rice, Ritz crackers, and cereal in the containers. A couple of these are Oxo Good Grips Pop Top containers that were given to us when we got married. I bought the rest of the containers at Walmart.

This shelf has snacks and chips. I have 5 snack containers and a small basket for chips. My hope is that this will keep us from buying too many snacks. Better Homes and Gardens sells their own version of pop top containers that are half the price of the Oxo brand.

This shelf has 2 small baskets for individual snacks, our bread, my peanut butter (I can't live without my peanut butter), and bags of rice, pasta, and mashed potatoes.

This shelf has miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is the type of stuff that has to be refrigerated once opened. This shelf also has all my sugar.

On the floor are 2 containers for more miscellaneous stuff-one of them is mostly baking stuff and our step stool.

These labels are made by Post-It and come on a roll like tape. They are supposed to be removable in case I need to change the label.

I also reorganized our refrigerator.

This is a "waste of space" under our counter which houses these plastic drawer things. I keep recipe books, aprons, oven mitts, kitchen towels, paper products, and canned food in these. 

I also used to keep a stock pile of food under this counter space. I am proud that that stock pile is now gone. The only food we have is what is in our pantry and fridge. I cut down on the amount of excess food we have because there are also things in the pantry that used to be housed somewhere else.

I don't know why I didn't organizer our food ages ago. I love just looking at it.