Beyond Spring Cleaning: How to Stay Organized All Year

Winter takes its toll on your home. Since it’s so dark and cold all the time, you rarely feel like cleaning and things inevitably get dirty. It happens to the best of us.

By the time spring rolls around though, you’re tired of the mess and ready to scour everything in sight. But cleaning the entire house in a weekend (or in a series of weekends) can be daunting. Your children’s toys are everywhere, clothes need to be donated, drawers need to be organized … and that’s just in your bedroom. With such a big mess, where do you even start?

Instead of having to go through this ordeal every spring, it might be helpful to keep things in order throughout the year. This way, when spring cleaning time rolls around, the job seems more manageable.

That’s a great idea, you might be thinking, but how do I keep things arranged in a more orderly way?

We’re glad you asked! Here are some excellent home organization ideas that should help:

For the Kitchen

• Subscribe to Pots and Pans – Pot lids can be tricky to store, due to their irregular shape and odd sizes. In order to store them more efficiently, install a magazine rack in a cabinet that will allow the lids to be hung up. That way, not only can you find a particular lid easy, the lids will also take up less space.

• Stuck on Utensils – Like pot lids, kitchen utensils can clutter drawers. For better organization, place a magnetic rack on a wall in your kitchen. You can then attach knives, scissors, wisks, spatulas, and whatever else you might need to it for easy access.

• Lackadaisical Refrigerator – As the year goes on, more and more items make their way into the refrigerator. When it gets cramped, it can be difficult to get items from the back and easy to forget about other products that might go bad. To solve this issue, put a Lazy Susan in your refrigerator. If it works in your cabinet, it will work in your refrigerator too.

For the Bedroom

• The Hanger Trick – You don’t need all the clothes in your closet, and you’d like to donate some of them. But every time you go to clean it out, you begin to think you might actually wear that blouse again. Try this: hang up every piece of clothing with the hangar facing backwards. When you wear that piece of clothing, hang it back up facing the correct way. When several months pass or the year ends, donate all the clothes on the backwards hangars.

• Pillow’s on the Case – There are sheets and blankets and pillowcases all over your closet taking up space. To make matters worse, every time you go looking for a set, it takes forever to find every piece. Instead of folding all the sheets, blankets, and pillowcases separately, fold up a set and place it inside a pillowcase. Next time you need to remake the bed, you’ll know exactly where to look.

For the Laundry Room

• File It Away – File cabinets don’t have to strictly contain paper. Place a file cabinet in your laundry room to organize all the washing and cleaning-related supplies.

• Get Your Roll On – Odds are, you have a few different laundry baskets. Maybe you have one for whites, one for darks, and one for workout clothes. Either way, carrying baskets one at a time is inefficient and can be difficult for children. To solve that problem, consider building a rolling laundry basket. You will be happy you did.

For Any Room

• Too Shoe for School – Although plastic, hangable shoe racks are specifically meant for footwear, they’re great because they can really be used for anything. Need to organize beauty supplies in your bathroom? Hang a shoe rack on the back of the door. Are your child’s craft supplies everywhere? Try a shoe rack. Can’t fit that filing cabinet in your laundry room to organize supplies? You guessed it … use a shoe rack.

Hopefully, these home organization ideas will not only help keep your house in order, but lessen your cleaning load as well. If you have any great organizing tips, be sure to share them with us on Facebook and Twitter!