How To Organize Rooms

Part of organizing your home is creating a functional, more efficient and orderly space for you. It follows that an organized home is different for everyone as we all require different needs from our homes.

There are, however, general tips for the rooms of your house that are fairly universal. If you want to be more organized but don’t know where to start, these tips can help you get the ball rolling.

Tips for Organizing Every Room in the House

Bathroom Organizing Tips

Every bathroom should have its own cleaning products. It’s definitely worth it to buy two of everything if you have two bathrooms in your home. There are times when bathrooms will need a quick wipe down up and if you have to go somewhere else to get a sponge and cleanser, you’re likely to get distracted and forget or put it off and you will have a bigger mess later.

A pet peeve of most home organizers is taking products from their original containers and putting them into prettier containers (astringents, Q-tips, etc). This is an extra, unnecessary step that doesn’t promote functionality. Items in their original containers are easily identifiable. Falling behind on refilling containers will only add guilt to your day. Who needs that?

Towels, spare toilet paper, and extra soap should be kept in the bathroom. If you don’t have space, create some by adding a shelf or a basket with rolled towels. You want your house to function more efficiently, and this means keeping products where you are going to use them. You want these things readily available to members of your household and guests. Don’t make me tell the story about the being stranded in the bathroom at a house party where the host kept spare toilet paper in the linen closet in the hallway.

The toilet brush should be kept somewhere where it’s visible. The toilet brush disguise gadgets are clever, but it’s polite to allow guests access to toilet bowl brushes.

Bathrooms should also have liquid soap dispensers. Bar soaps at sinks are messy and require constant clean up to appear neat. Again, you want things to be easy and neat.

Cleaning and Organizing Bedrooms

Just like bathrooms need to contain their elements, bedrooms need to contain their sheets and pillow cases. Spare sheets should be kept in a closet. An orderly way to keep them is folded then inserted inside one of the pillow cases. Before you start complaining about closet space, how many sets of sheets do you have for each bedroom?

Each bed only needs two sets of sheets. If you have more than that, you can keep them in storage containers or in a linen closet until they are needed. Ten sets of sheets create laundry mountains and wasted space.

Every bedroom should have a trash basket. It doesn’t need to be large, but there are times when it’s necessary. You will appreciate how clean your nightstand stays when you add a small trash basket. Speaking of nightstands, shelves and drawers are not a catch-all for items that don’t belong there. When you are finished with the book, put it back on a bookshelf.

If you removed your fingernail polish while watching TV in bed, put it back where it belongs instead of on a shelf or a nightstand drawer. Drawers of nightstands should be sparsely filled, not junk drawers. The trash can will help.

Kitchen Organizing

Kitchens should be very light on decor, especially on countertops, window sills, and sink edges. Your kitchen should be simple to clean and all about function. If you don’t use the cute banana stand or pretty baskets, get rid of them. If you have more than two sets of dishes and don’t have a family of 10, you are wasting space.

Tupperware plastic containers are an organized person’s nightmare. When you unload the dishwasher, have you ever opened your plastic container cupboard, thrown in the latest addition, then closed the door before everything fell out of the cupboard?

Can you honestly say you have lids to fit all of your miscellaneous plastic containers? The clever new caddies that spin around and all use the same size lid is the most ingenious invention I’ve seen for kitchen organization. You should invest in one and dump all of your plastic containers. If you need two, so be it, but don’t buy the second unit just so you don’t have to clean out old leftovers from the fridge.

Organizing Living and Family Rooms

Keep knickknacks and tabletop decor to a minimum. Remember that end tables are there for your convenience, not as a decoration display stand. Only the book or magazine that you are currently reading should be on your tables. Books and magazines sitting on tables as decorations are just other things to clean, and they take away from a neat, clean, organized look.

If you have a million remote controls, a remote control caddy is wonderful for keeping them neat and from being lost. If there are video games, an organizer is perfect for keeping the players and the organized person happy. It hides all of the cords and gives video game controllers and games places to go to keep them neatly hidden away while they aren’t being played.

If you start with these organization tips, you’ll start to feel more orderly, and you’ll probably get a feel for “functional neatness,” which is all there really is to home organization