Organize your home or room. This is a piece of advice that we have heard both from our parents and professional organizers.
Decluttering your space not only makes your interiors look good but proves to be a necessary step to create a stimulating, clean and calming environment indoors. This facilitates positivity, productivity and helps you find the required stuff in a jiffy. Additionally, we have to admit – a cluttered space is way difficult and tedious to clean.
However, organizing stuff at home is a strategic art. So, if you want to use your storage facilities effectively for a squeaky clean home, we have listed the best organization and cleaning tips for you in this article.
10 Best Organization And Cleaning Tips For Your Home
An organization is a stabilization of your possessions at home that factor over time, money, space, and effort. When organizing, we want fewer steps and the least effort. This means regularity is a must. Else, even if you declutter once, you won’t be able to keep it up for long.
Thus, follow the 10 organizing tips below to declutter your home, room by room.
1. Where to Start
If you wish to organize multiple areas in your home, it is always easy to pick one by one. Just decide an area you wish to start with that may have the most clutter or the one that is upfront to guests, like the foyer or the living room.
Depending on the amount of clutter you have at home, spread your organization plan across a few days and take up one or two rooms each day. However, once you start organizing a room, ensure that you finish the task.
Many people fail at organizing their homes as it seems daunting. So, after you complete organizing one area, take a break, celebrate, and then move on to the next.
2. Organization Takes Time
Home organization is not an overnight thing. And it completely depends on the area you wish to organize. In fact, after organizing, you may also attempt to reorganize based on your tastes and preferences. So, always schedule an hour or two every day to work on managing the area easily.
3. Reduce What You Have
It’s the most direct and easy plan for an efficient home organization because reduction lets you focus on what is important. You may also see that you may have been hoarding a lot of things that you do not need anymore. This decluttering spree would help you a lot to arrange your stuff at home effectively.
4. Clean Your Closet
When cleaning the closet, go through all the items in it. Separate the stuff you need from the stuff you don’t need, and place the latter in a donation bag. However, when giving out clothes and other items as donations, ensure that the items are not too old or worn out. Apply a two-year rule. If you have not worn a dress in the past two years, it is high time to donate it or dump it.
5. Relieve Your Kitchen From The Chaos
Cleaning up the kitchen inventory can be a hefty task. So, start with arranging the section where you keep your cutleries. Move to the drawers and cabinets where you keep everyday ingredients and other daily-use items.
Organize them in a way so that they can be reached easily. Lastly, arrange all the steel and plastic containers along with their lids. Empty the kitchen bin daily. You can rethink storage facilities in your kitchen by adding some open shelves, roll-on carts, etc. if required.
6. Eliminate Unused, Old Footwears
Though shoes may be close to your heart, you need to dispose of the ones you don’t use anymore to effectively declutter your shoe racks and foyer area. Keep the shoes you use aside and arrange them on your shoe rack as per their usage.
On the top shelves go the daily wear, while on the lower shelves go your party pumps, winter boots, and other occasional footwear.
7. Garbage Bins To The Rescue
Garbage bags and bins help keep your space clutter-free. And, when you keep it in a space from where it is visible (like, beside cupboards in the bedroom or near a wall of the kitchen), its effective usage by all members becomes a silent rule in the house.
Keep small to medium dustbins in almost all your rooms, and make sure to empty them every day to avoid the accumulation of dust and unnecessary disposables in your space.
8. Label Them All
While segregating your stuff in different boxes is a good organizing strategy, labeling makes it most efficient. Because, think about it – without labelling, it will be difficult for you to remember every little detail of where you kept what.
Eventually, you are going to forget. So, labelling helps you find your stuff quickly without having to go through all your stuff for hours. Additionally, after labelling, you can put your boxes in a way that the daily usable are quickly accessible while the ones that are not so much in use are kept a little away into the cupboard, closet, or cabinet.
9. Are Your Habits Responsible For The Clutter?
When you see clutter in your home, understand the primary cause behind it may be some of your habits that you are overlooking. Be aware of your activities, no matter how minor, on a daily basis to analyze how you are causing the clutter in your home.
Simple activities like taking out clothes from the washing machine or how you keep your dishes after dinner can show you the changes you need to bring in yourself to maintain a decluttered and clean home.
10. The Focus 15 Method
In our fast lives, it is difficult to make time to accomplish basic tasks like cleaning, arranging, and organizing spaces at home.
If you feel too tired or fall prey to procrastination whenever you feel like organizing your home, apply the Focus 15 method, in which you set the timer to 15 minutes and attempt to complete an intended task within the timeframe.
However, when using this technique, attempt tasks that are simpler and easier like cleaning up your almirah or one of the kitchen cabinets.
5 Benefits of an Organized Home
A well-arranged and clean space always looks inviting and calming. Apart from being hygienic and clean, it creates an ambiance that you want to reside in. So, in case you are wondering why, here are five instant benefits that you get when you organize your home.
1. You can Save Time
Clutter and disorganization impact your life heavily. Finding simple things like car keys, wallets, etc., can become a tedious everyday task. But when you organize your place by making room for each and every object, you help smoothen the functionality of your life and your home.
2. You can Save Money
Did you know that you buy more stuff for yourself when you don’t organize your space? This adds to your extra expenditure, further impacting your overall savings.
Whether it’s a new dress or vegetables in an overstuffed fridge, if your place is not organized, you probably don’t remember each and every object you already have and end up buying new ones.
As per multiple professional organizers, this is the case with many who don’t arrange their stuff at home. This, however, can be avoided when you organize your home and maintain it regularly.
You will remember the place of each object, and you won’t end up buying the extras which, as a result, will help you save your money.
3. Reduces Stress and Keeps Your Mind Organized
Complexity welcomes confusion which directly affects your mind and increases stress. For instance, when you open multiple tabs on the browser, chances are you get scatter-brained and lose concentration. The same is with your house.
If you keep it organized, you will feel the same way, too. The stress will vanish, and you will feel more calm, grounded, positive, and productive. This is more so because decluttering and organizing offers your home a lot of breathing space, creating an expansive effect on the dwellers.
4. Helps Maintain Self-Discipline
The task of organizing your home is not just a decluttering process but disciplining yourself. Self-discipline comes with self-organization, and your home is a reflection of who you are. So, when you start arranging your things at home, declutter and dispose of the items not in need, you are cultivating self-discipline. This aspect is further developed when you take your time out to clean, arrange and maintain your home every other day after organizing it.
Some quick and everyday tips for organizing your home, as per home organizers, include:
- Make your bed every morning.
- Keeping a donation bag in your closets
- Placing close lid trash bins as close to your bed as possible.
- Hanging more hooks and/or wall shelves.
5. Become An Example For Others
Although not all may exercise house organization, everyone loves to see and be in a neat and clean home. By organizing your home, you not only create an aesthetically pleasing, functional, and relaxing space for yourself but also inspire others to do the same in their homes. This can also make you popular amongst your guests where you can give out organizing tips of your own to help them out. If you stay with your family, you can even inspire them to spontaneously participate in home organization.
Final Thoughts
No matter how you design the interiors of your home, for proper maintenance, you need effective organization of your possessions. Clutters only add confusion, stress, and filth to your space. To establish good health, cleanliness, calmness, and beauty in your space, organize your home. Seek help from professional organizers, if needed, as they can help you with the strategic organization of your stuff based on your home space and storage facilities. You can also take inspiration from the best organization and cleaning tips we have listed in this article.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Some of the best organizing tips demand you to look at your home as a first-time visitor. Identify the areas in your home that require organization. Make a decluttering checklist, segregate the items to be disposed of, keep dustbins in every room, and dust and clean every day. If you have old clothes that can be used by others, donate them. Take before and after pictures of a particular area after cleaning and organization.
An honest answer is whichever area of the house seems important to you. You can either start with your bedroom if that is the space you think most of the cleaning is required, or you can go for the living room and foyer if you have regular guests. Whatever area of your home you choose, ensure you take one step at a time and don’t try to finish organizing the entire home in one go.
People, when decluttering their homes, often, get confused about whether to organize or clean the house first. In such a case, we suggest you organize your house first, then clean and dispose of the dirt. Organizing your home first also helps you pick trash easily. You will also be left with less clutter to clean then.