What’s next?

After doing a few trouble spots of organizing in the house, what is next?  (see last week’s blog for details) 

My spots were the pantry and a kitchen cabinet.  And I feel better already! 

You can keep going and hit a few more small spots.  It’s an easy way to feel a sense of progress and success.  Also, you will be learning your style of organizing.  This is important when you get to the bigger stuff.  To know how you clean out and how throwing things out and moving things around affect you will be important when you get to emotionally charged things. 

So, what about organizing style?  It may seem, by watching home improvement shows or reading magazine articles, that there is a right way to get organized.  But there are SO many different styles of getting through all the stuff and finding a system that works for you. 

The most important thing is to find an organizing system that works for you is that it is easily maintained.  But here are a few basic principles to keep in mind: 

•  Find a spot/home for everything – nothing lands and stays randomly

•  Keep surfaces mostly clear

•  Pair down enough so that things can “breathe” - aka you can see everything!

•  Group like-items together

You might not be a labeling person – and that’s ok!  You might love storage boxes or baskets.  You might like to hang things on the wall (going vertical is a great way to use space).  I love to label, and I like to contain things.  But you might like open shelving and easy access to items.   What you want to find…is all your stuff!   

You want to find a system for you that you can maintain.  There will probably be an initial purge.  But after that, there needs to be a plan for things that enter the house.  And this can be for each area as you get to work on them – different plans for different areas of the house.  The plan will change over time.  And the plan will be forgotten.  And cleaning out will happen again.  But getting to know how this system works for you in YOUR house will help in the future.  It’s best to not just throw everything out (even though, some days, I just want to do that) – it’s going to be a slow-going and sometimes frustrating process.  Yikes!  Who want to start now?!  Yay?  But it’s like a diet – you need something that will work long term.  A crash diet will work short term, but it’s hard to maintain and there is major burn out quickly.  To be organized in the home is to find a “stuff diet” that works – and can keep working. 

The goal should be that you are using your home and storage areas to have the things you need and know where it all is and have easy access to it when you need it.  I am going to be on this organizing journey too.  I like to do it – but sometimes it just NEEDS to get done!  Organizing is an ongoing project.  Things are always coming in the house and need a home.  And if the stuff that’s already here doesn’t have a home, where is the new stuff going to go? 

So I am going to be tackling some big areas in the near future…  There’s a room in my house that has been catching stuff all summer (and for the past 4 years) – and there are so many things that I need in that room, that I think are in that room, and I have no clue where they are.  Or I have to move stuff out of the way to access them.  And it’s driving me crazy.  It wastes my time.  It results in duplicate stuff.   And the time is now… or at least very soon!