By Manasa Reddigari
Don’t let the idea of organizing the house overwhelm you. Clear clutter and tidy things up with these home organization ideas for every corner of the house.
Simple strategies for an organized home
Every homeowner wants a well-kept house, but not everyone has the energy or time to spend hours on end sprucing up their digs. Fortunately, many small tidying tasks can boost the comfort, cleanliness, and style of your home with minimal effort. Click through for a list of home organization tasks that are so easy—and dare we say it, fun—that you’ll want to get right to them.
Use Color to Avoid Confusion
You’re bound to confuse your partner’s, child’s, or even pet’s toothbrush, towel, or hairbrush for your own if everyone’s beauty and health essentials are the same color. Ditch the matchy-matchy approach and assign a different color to each member of the family. Implement the color-coded system for bathroom essentials and beyond to prevent embarrassing mix-ups.
Trim the Toy Chest
Take a cue from organizer extraordinaire Marie Kondo and rid your children’s toy chests of blocks, dolls, and games that no longer spark joy. In the process, you’ll free up space for any new toys you add this year. Donate the discarded items to charity, and arrange the keepers neatly in baskets and containers. Stow small knickknacks in clear Muji pouches for fuss-free storage and retrieval.
Adopt the One-Hanger Approach
No outfit is complete without coordinating accessories,so why store purses, scarves, hats, and belts on a separate shelf or hanger in the closet? Cut clutter and save yourself a daily rummage through the closet by arranging matching tops and bottoms on a single hanger, then drape the perfect accessories for that outfit on the same hanger.
Go Vertical
The garage floor is one of the most cluttered surfaces in the home, primarily because the storage potential of the garage walls is so often overlooked. Line the garage walls with shelves, racks, slat walls, or pegboards to keep paint cans, tools, and bicycles safely stowed but accessible. Set up a pulley system to keep seldom-used garage accessories like ladders hoisted high and out of the way of everyday garage activities.
Take Your Receipts Digital
If you’re a diligent record keeper, you no doubt have a box or kitchen drawer overflowing with carefully saved receipts. Cure drawer disarray and make it easier to retrieve the receipt you need for a return or exchange by taking your receipts digital with an app like Shoeboxed. Simply download the app on your smartphone, use the phone’s camera to take a photo of your latest receipt, and recycle the physical copy. The app will let you search for and pull up any of your uploaded receipts in seconds.
Condense the Closet
The start of a new season is the best time to survey the contents of your closet and purge it of clothes you no longer wear. As a general guideline, if you haven’t worn an item in a year, you’re unlikely to wear it again. Be ruthless, then bag up the discards for donation or sell them at a yard sale. While you’re at it, check for missing buttons, tricky zippers, or small tears on the clothes you’re keeping, and make any necessary repairs.
Avoid Lost Linens
Do you find yourself dressing the beds in mismatching sheets and pillowcases more often than not? Try this trick: Before you put a set of linens in the closet, fold the fitted sheet, flat sheet, and one pillowcase, then stash all the folded linens inside the remaining pillowcase. You’ll never again lose a piece of the set, and the linens inside the pillowcase will stay clean and wrinkle-free until you’re ready to use them.
Look Beneath the Bed
You don’t need to buy a bed with built-in storage to leverage the potential of underbed storage. As long as you have ample room beneath your bed, you can furnish the empty space with containers made expressly for this purpose, or with freestanding bins or baskets. If you’re feeling creative, you can even use old wine crates or drawers fitted with casters for easy access. Fill your underbed storage containers with out-of-season clothes and linens, then roll them back under the bed to free up closet space and keep your bedroom the serene sanctuary it was meant to be.
File Away Fashions
When you stack folded shirts or towels in a drawer, only the topmost item is visible. If, however, you fold them like files so they sit upright, you can survey the entire collection at once and pinpoint the one you want in a flash. And if you take it one step further and arrange your file-folded garments by color, you can shave precious moments from your morning outfit selection routine.
Cover Up Cables
Conceal cords and cables that run the length of your office, living room, or bedroom by feeding them into baseboard cord channels. You can stick these self-adhesive, neutral-colored cord channels directly to your baseboards and then run your cords through the opening to hide unsightly cables and protect them from damage.
Roll with Trash Day
Fed up with fumbling with that roll of garbage bags on trash day? If you park the whole roll on a paper towel holder, you’ll be able to unfurl and tear off a bag in seconds. You can stand the roll upright on a countertop, or for even faster retrieval, mount the roll to a kitchen wall or behind the door of an under-sink cabinet.
