Mail piling up in the corner. Shoes tumbling out of your closet. A pantry packed full of random cans. Not to mention you haven’t seen the surface of your kitchen table in months! An unorganized home can be difficult in many ways – it’s hard to relax when surrounded by stuff, but tackling everything can seem like an overwhelmingly huge job.
To help you out, we’ve put together some quick ways to organize your house. These small tasks can be done in short bursts but can make a huge difference in your quest to declutter.
How to Organize Your Home
Organize in 10-Minute Bursts
Organizing doesn’t have to mean setting aside days at a time to overhaul your entire house. Instead, set aside 10 minutes per day to tackle one part of the house, whether it’s a junk drawer, a table, or one of your dresser drawers. Approaching your organizing tasks in small chunks can help it feel much more manageable, and you’ll be surprised at the amount of progress you see in a week!
Clean the Clutter Areas
We all have those places in the home – the dining room table, an entryway table, or part of the kitchen counter – that becomes a dumping ground for keys, mail, homework, toys, and more. Clearing clutter from these high-visibility areas is a great way to organize your house with little effort.
To prevent clutter from building up in these areas, establish new homes for the items you find yourself throwing on a table. Set aside a drawer, cubby, or folder on your desk to store important mail and bills, hang hooks right inside the door for keys, and help your kids find a new place for homework, bags, and toys in their own rooms.
It may also help to place decorative items where you find clutter to prevent it from building up in the future. Put a vase of flowers and nice placemats on the dining room table or add a decorative tray with a plant and candle to an entryway table. Sometimes, something as small as a vase of flowers can block clutter from accumulating.
Use Organizational Tools
Organizational experts everywhere tout the use of drawer organizers, boxes, shelves, and racks for minimizing clutter – and for good reason! Something as simple as adding a portable shoe rack to your closet can be the difference between a jumbled pile of shoes and a streamlined row of your favorite boots.
A few places where organizational tools can make a big difference, quickly.
- Add a spinning plate to your fridge to easily store condiments.
- Use old soda boxes to sort your cans in your pantry.
- Repurpose an old silverware tray to sort items in your junk drawer.
- Add old shoeboxes to your underwear and sock drawers to help sort and separate.
- Buy big boxes to store toys in areas that your children can easily access.
Tackle Your Closets
For many of us, our closets are packed to the brim with clothes that haven’t seen the light of day in years. Set aside some time sort through your clothes and donate those that haven’t been worn in several years. Focus on keeping clothes that fit your current lifestyle – as cute as the miniskirt that you wore clubbing in your early 20s is, it may not be worth holding on to if your life involves more wine nights at home than crazy nights out in the city.
Once you’ve whittled down the number of items in your closet, decide how you want to organize it. Hangers can be great for nice dresses or wrinkle-prone skirts, but t-shirts and jeans could be folded and stored in drawers more easily. Folding clothes Marie Kondo-style can help you see everything you own in one glance, instead of having to dig through tall piles of shirts or sweaters.
Your closet can be organized over days (or even weeks) – maybe you use your 10 minutes of daily organizing to tackle a different part of your closet until it’s looking as tidy as can be!
Above all, organizing your home doesn’t need to feel like a chore. Tackle areas of the house in short bursts, blast some music, make it a game for your kids, and have fun! There’s nothing better than getting to relax and enjoy the clutter-free comforts of your home.