Organizing Does Not Have To Be Expensive

So you want to organize your life. You see all the beautiful Instagram posts and magazine layouts of perfectly organized homes. Beautiful built-ins where kids backpacks are hung, baskets for mittens and shelves for shoes. You think to yourself how wonderful it would be to have such organization, if only you could afford to have someone come build a mudroom with cubbies and shelving. What to do? Not everyone can afford to live like the photos in House Beautiful, and sometimes the pictures are unrealistic to maintain. There are simple inexpensive tips that you can put to practice in your own home which can help with various “dumping areas.” These areas are usually the places strewn with clutter. For example, backpacks dumped by the garage or front door, mail in a large pile in the kitchen, and laundry areas filled with clutter.

Home from School

For backpacks, try hanging hooks by the area where your children come into the house. Remember to use heavy duty hooks so that as they get older and the backpacks get heavier, they won’t fall off the wall. Baskets are inexpensive and can be bought in most stores. These inexpensive plastic wicker looking baskets can be found at Bed Bath and Beyond. These baskets come in three sizes. Maybe have one basket per child for them to put their hats, mittens and scarves. You may want to purchase different colors and assign each child to a color. Milk crates can be another inexpensive option for kids shoes.

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Children bring home a large amount of paper. If you don’t have lots of shelf space, you can find inexpensive rolling carts with tiers so you can have a tier per child to hold their papers. Here is an example:

Forever Stamps

Mail can pile up if not dealt with immediately. Try getting in the habit of recycling your junk mail daily. Assign an area of your kitchen, office or foyer where you would like mail to live. Purchase a small desktop mail holder to keep mail from laying in piles on your counter. If you get magazines or store catalogues, try to read them promptly and then recycle. We all fall into the trap of putting mail aside and saying to ourselves we will get to it later. Before you know it you have a pile of magazines which builds and builds and never is read.

Wash & Fold

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The laundry room ends up being a catchall for many things. Pet supplies, cleaning products, dirty laundry- you name it. Try putting your cleaning supplies in a container. Perhaps an inexpensive carry-all caddy or an open-top container. The carry-all is convenient as you can just grab it in one hand and rags in another. All of your supplies are at your finger-tips. For pet supplies, create a small pet zone. Food dishes, beds/crates, pegs to hang leashes/collars, and a shelf to put food. Be sure everything is not in the flow of traffic so people do not trip. By creating a pet area, you can see how much pet supplies you have and it will help you from over purchasing pet supplies at the store. Laundry can be a hassle. Everyone in the house is dumping their dirty laundry all over. If space allows, having 3 hampers makes sense. A dark color for darks, white for whites and a lighter color such as light grey for light clothing. As your children get older teach them to bring their dirty clothes to the laundry room and put in the correct hamper. This is a win-win for everyone. Your kids will not have dirty clothes strewn all over their rooms, it teaches them responsibility, and it will make your life easier when doing the wash.

Basic, Casual or Formal

One final note, kitchen tables and dining rooms tend to be dumping areas for everyone on the family. One way to avoid that, is to have it set with placemats, and a center piece such as candles all the time. Most people will not dump their stuff on a set table. Remember, organizing does not have to break the bank. As you can see there are inexpensive ways to organize to bring calm and less chaos into your family’s life. Have another inexpensive idea to help organize your house? Post on our Facebook page and let us know!

What Retirement Reveals

So you’re finally retired. Wonderful news! Now you can get to all those books you have been meaning to read, take a trip when and where you want, spend more time with friends, children and grandchildren, and volunteer at your favorite charity. Being retired gives you the freedom to make your own schedule, and also means you will be home a lot more than you were in the past.

However, spending more hours at home means having the time to actually look at your home. Often our retired clients will tell us that after a few months of being home they start noticing how much “stuff” accumulated over the years. Collections from no longer living relatives are in the attic, keepsakes from children are in the closets, a garage filled with old sporting equipment and a basement filled with boxes.

Retirees try to figure out how all these piles took over their space while they were at work. What to do? Where to even begin? Maybe it is time to call a professional organizer.

A professional organizer will come to your space and access the situation. You will get a clear understanding of the time and cost necessary to help you sort, review and organize the areas of your house which are cluttered and could benefit from finished organized systems. A professional can assist you in making hard decisions that can be challenging on your own, such as what to keep, where to donate and how to appraise items which may be of value. Many professional organizers will remove your smaller unwanted items at the end of the session, arrange for donation or junk pick up for larger items and set up a walk through with an auction house for possible sale items.

Organizers have knowledge of the best storage solution for your space.  In addition to containers you may benefit from shelves and other storage solutions. At House to Home Organizing, one of our popular services is our concierge shopping service that makes your life that much easier. Shopping in a crowded store overflowing with options can be stressful. Let us bring the solutions to you.

Retirement can be great for relaxing, but sometimes it can be hard to restart physical activities. It is really important to note that Professional Organizers provide manual labor and momentum which is something everyone needs when reducing clutter. It can be easy to start a project but many people get distracted easily and never finish. Organizing requires serious decision making, focus and energy.

Every job is different as to where to start and the time needed to complete. Having a no charge consult at is a great way to understand the process and the time commitment. Spending more time at home should be a pleasure not a burden. So if you are looking to enjoy retirement, want to spend your time doing the things you love as opposed to de-cluttering, do yourself a favor and call a professional organizer. You will not be sorry!

Make it Go Away

When potential clients contact us, we ask them about their space challenges and one of the most common answers is one or all of the big three: attic, basement and garage. We call these areas “Make it go away” spaces. The habit goes past out of sight out of mind to reveal a deeper issue with clutter and how we deal with stuff. When we have homes for items, organizational systems make sense; however, for many household items when they don’t have a home they end up in the attic, basement or garage. You ever notice people don’t use “put it” that much, but rather “throw it” when talking about those make it go away items.

The Items in Question

Stuff we hide in the attic usually falls into two camps, those items we don’t know what do with in the first place and those items that don’t have an easy category. Think about your holiday decorations. That category is pretty straight forward. Items that don’t have an easily defined category usually have to do with the word “could.” Saving items for what if scenarios can lead to a clutter attic or basement. These items tend to be bulky like canoe oars or skis. Another challenge can be the “I feel I need to keep it” section. This is where that chair from your great uncle’s house comes in.

Solutions

Why does it matter if the attic or basement are clear, anyway? We not only want to use that storage space to keep items we don’t use often like keepsakes and seasonal items but one way or another you will move eventually and those heavy clutter zones make a stressful time that much more stressful. When it comes to excessive clutter most people get stuck even knowing where to start. The attic and basement require time, physical labor and a plan. A professional organizer not only provides you with special motivated time, experience, and a systematic approach we also bring the manual labor. Focus on why you are keeping the item in the first place. If the item isn’t expensive or can easily be obtained again maybe it is time for it to move on. Consider splitting a dumpster with a neighbor for a day of bulk removal helping each other lug that rusty antique creepy baby carriage down from the attic. Kicking the can down the road adds up in your valuable space if you are stuck indoors due to weather why not use that time to actually “make it go away”

Guest Post - Home Move: Making It an Enjoyable Experience

Home Move: Making It an Enjoyable Experience

Moving is not an easy task but it doesn’t have to be a procession of misery. Every now and then we are faced with this activity, and its frequency is especially familiar to roaming millennials that tend to move from one apartment to the other. Anxiety will not only make the entire experience feel longer, it will also make you less efficient and, even worse, open the possibility for mismanagement and lost items. If the long and stress-inducing shadow of a big move looms over your head, here’s how the move can be reassessed, making it an enjoyable experience.

Declutter before you begin

If you need to move, you just need to start packing, right? Well, it is not as simple as it sounds. Chances are, your temporary home is quite “lived in” and there are numerous items just lying around, and some have probably even turned into dangerous stumbling blocks. Before the big move, you need to declutter your home, and it can actually end up being a much longer and bigger task than you initially thought. Just start with the small things and start putting them into labeled cardboard boxes. Once you start packing things into a car or a van, these will go on top, so put them first in the area where they won’t stand in the way.

Jagged edges and sharp objects

Decluttering can last for several weeks, and in the meantime, you can think of ways to minimize the chances for injury during the move, as well as the integrity of bulkier items. You can use duct tape to “secure” these bulkier items to an extent and make the jagged edges safer. You can also purchase special types of Styrofoam coverings which can make matters even easier and safer. By properly covering and securing your bulky furniture, you are killing two birds with one stone – keeping yourself and indeed the furniture safe. You don’t need extra expenditure on your hands after the costly move.

Don’t be ashamed to look for help

If the entire project appears to be too overwhelming for you, don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Turn to your family members or friends to lend a hand and ask them if they can also put their vehicle to your service. Prioritize asking the help from someone who owns a minivan, because it will make the entire move much breezier. Still, there are solutions even if everybody’s too busy to help out. These removalists from Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, for example, offer an efficient move with no hidden charges and with astounding efficiency. Therefore, you are not exactly without options.

Don’t leave anything waiting the day before the move

All of your tasks related to moving, including the preparation of furniture and packing of smaller goods, should be done as late as the morning before the move. You need some time to clear your head before the main part of the job begins and, as the natural main organizer of the occasion, you need to be on your toes throughout the process in order to save precious time of everyone involved.

Check after you move

After all of the stuff has been moved to the new apartment or a house, go back to the old place and check it thoroughly before you hand in the keys. Look into the remaining nooks and crannies in search of possible missed items and – this is the extremely important part – check if all the remaining devices and appliances are turned off. The last thing you need is to pay excess bills or, even worse, the insurance of the household you have just left forever.

While uprooting your entire life and changing the backdrop of your daily activities can be an extremely stressful endeavor, especially if you are anxious by nature, it can also be a chance for a new beginning, the rite of passage to the exciting tomorrow and a new arrangement filled with opportunities. In the end, it is all about perspective – the point of view can turn a deplorable situation into something inspiring or at least something you are indifferent towards. The only truly important element that should be taken out of the equation is anxiety.

Lillian Connors can’t resist the urge to embark on a myriad of green living/home improvement projects and spread the word about them. She cherishes the notion that sustainable housing and gardening will not only make us far less dependent on others regarding the dwellings we inhabit, but also contribute to our planet being a better place to live on. You can check her out on Twitter.