11 Home Organizing Tips That Actually Work

Sometimes it seems like a prayer without end to organize your home. No matter how much you tidy up and clean, you probably feel like it will be messy again in no time and your home is always disorganized.

There is no single strategy for organizing your home, as everything depends on your personality. However, some tips are essential for everyone and applying them will help you organize your home better.

Before you start organizing your home

The first thing to do is determine which areas of your home annoy you the most. Analyze them carefully and then come up with the possible solutions. Don’t try to organize your whole house at once. Spend some time on each space. Tackle them one by one, even if it takes several days.

It’s also important that you and your family stick with the decisions you make so that you don’t make the same mistake of having a disorganized home. With these considerations in mind, you can apply the following tips to help organize your home.

1. Don’t keep things you don’t use

Closets are often full of stuff ‘just in case’. If you don’t use something, it’s time to throw it away. You probably have countless things that you no longer use stored in a cupboard or boxes.

This is often because you hope or think that you will use them (again) in the future or because they bring back good memories. For example, consider things such as:

• books.
• ornaments.
• documents.
• old clothes.
• records that you no longer listen to because nowadays we often only listen to music on a mobile phone.

All these things that you no longer use but store somewhere, take up space. You can no longer use that space for anything else. If something is in a box or cabinet, it will likely stay there for a long time and take up space.

You only see it every time you try to organize your home and you just save it again. Often for months or years. So it’s best to just throw some things away right away.

If someone gives you gifts or you buy something new for yourself, immediately remove something that is old. Donate it, give it away or throw it away if it no longer works. Don’t save it ‘just in case’.

2. Put things in the same place to organize your home

Make sure you always leave your keys and wallet in the same place. Many items enter your home every day, from keys and wallets to purchases, mail and bags.

Find a suitable place for everything, whether or not your family takes these things with them when they leave. For example, place a key holder next to the door or a shelf for mail and a rack for magazines. Don’t let everything pile up on a table or chair.

3. Store things by their frequency of use

Organize your cabinets and drawers intelligently. Make sure that what you use every day is easily accessible. What you rarely use, you can store on the shelf of the closet that you can only reach with a chair.

If you put the things you rarely use with the things you use often, you probably have to take them all off the shelf when you need something. That takes a lot of time and energy.

4. Divide your drawers and shelves to organize your home

Don’t keep all your stuff together in drawers and on shelves. Using drawer dividers helps keep them organized. This allows you to make better use of the space without having to stack.

5. Don’t keep things on tables

People often put objects on a table that they want to put away later. However, this never happens. It’s one of the most common temptations to put everything on the table. While the intent is to do this temporarily, the table will always be cluttered in the end.

• Make it a house rule that this should not happen.
• If this doesn’t work, somehow block your table with a decoration such as a vase.

Julie Isaac, the author of the blog Our Uncluttered Home , recommends putting flowers or small decorations on your tables or even to always set your dining table with plates and cutlery so you don’t pile things on top.

6. Don’t buy storage boxes until you throw away everything you don’t need

Before you buy a box or piece of furniture to store things in, make sure you’ve already thrown out everything you don’t need. The reason for this is because, if you have more storage space than you actually need, you will probably accumulate a lot of unnecessary things. This creates another organizational problem.

7. Divide the tasks to organize your home

Planning your household chores is a great way to make sure your home is always clean and organized. If your family isn’t already helping you with the chores, assign certain tasks to each family member.

• So someone has to remove the plates from the table, another has to wash them and another has to put them away.
• One cleans the bathrooms, the other the kitchen.

Everyone should also be responsible for cleaning their own room and making their own bed. This rule must be strictly enforced. If one family member doesn’t adhere to this, the others may find it an excuse not to do their part.

8. Clean things up after you use them

An easy but bad habit is to leave stuff after use to clean up later. The problem is that “later” never comes. That’s why you should let your kids clean up their toys after they’ve finished playing.

Also, don’t allow them to leave the plates on the table after they’ve finished eating, and wash your cookware and cutlery right after you’ve finished cooking and eating.

• The tasks you assign to each family member should be done right away, not later.

9. Don’t collect hangers

Clothes hangers only take up space in your closet that you can then use for storage. When you take your clothes home from the laundromat or buy new clothes, you often bring a hanger with you to hang it up. So without realizing it, you end up with more hangers than clothes and your closet gets fuller by the day.

• Return the hangers to the laundromat or leave them at recycling locations.

10. Don’t use the garage or attic to store everything

Garages or attics are also useful spaces, so you shouldn’t just use them as a ‘clutter shed’. Your garage and attic are also part of your home. So don’t turn them into a repository.

If you live in a house with a garage or attic, you often think that in these spaces you always have space to store things you don’t use. With that thought, you will eventually overload them and turn them into disorganized spaces that annoy you. Just remove the old stuff from your house as we explained above.

11. Spend one day a year organizing your home

Even if you adopt the best strategies to organize your home, clutter is inevitable again. It doesn’t matter if you feel like your home is finally as organized as you dreamed.

Therefore, you should use one day a year to check and make sure that you have not collected unnecessary things, that your shelves and drawers are in order and that everything is in place. Now it’s time to organize your home! Check each space and decide where to start. You will thank yourself later!