instantly organize and free up space
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This little basket corrals the mess of lotions, Vicks, and various medication that you can never seem to put away in the winter. Plus it matches my sheets and lamp.
I’m not a big New Year’s resolution person, but after the chaos of Christmas clutter, I am really big on organizing and freeing up space. When putting the Christmas decor away, I find it a good opportunity to dispose of underutilized decorations, as well as reorganizing and labeling bins. Facing a long, dreary winter in New England, I usually use this time to clean up the rest of my house. Cleaning, organizing, and freeing up space, helps me to clear my mind and reduces my anxiety. I find when my house is cluttered, my mind feels the same. I feel distracted by the need to clean, rather than do other fun things, like spending time with my family.
This is about as organized as a junk drawer gets. It includes spots for things we need almost every day - pen, pencils, sharpeners, batteries, bag clips, scissors, an assortment of tools, etc. I use these storage trays in different sizes to organize the drawers.
Here are a couple of things I do to instantly organize and free up space:
We use drawer bins to organize our sons drawing and art paper, markers, and glue. You can find something similar at Target.
Add bins/trays. We’ve added bins and tray organizers to our drawers all over the house and it makes such a huge difference. Our “junk drawer” is organized and makes it so much easier to know where the scissors are, versus the pens, batteries, screwdriver, pliers, bag clips, etc. are in the drawer. Other places I use bins/organizers:
Sock drawer. My socks needed corralling and a bin keeps them from hobnobbing with my undies. Looks nice and neat too!
Night stand. In the winter I find that with all the medications, tissues, thermometers I need at the ready, my night stand was a constant mess. With the addition of a little bin, it’s so much better. I also have my skin lotion (a necessity in the dry winter air) and bands for my physical therapy corralled in there too.
Shoes. We don’t have a luxury walk in closet and I need a way to organize my shoes and keep them dust free.
If you haven’t used it, toss it. Never sure if all the things in my house bring me happiness exactly, but there are some things you just need and there are some things you really don’t.
Old manuals. You can find all of these online. Recycle these immediately. Literally why are you holding onto them?
Old boxes. If you’ve had the thing past a point you can return it, recycle the box. My father-in-law still has boxes for stuff he doesn’t even own anymore like VCRs, garden tools, and telephones. WHY?!
Old clothes, textiles, etc. If you haven’t worn or used something in more than 3 years, you never will and it will likely be out of style by the time you “fit” into it again anyway. Note: thousands of pounds of clothes and textiles are tossed every year. Try to upcycle, donate (animal shelters love old blankets and towels), sell (on Facebook) or consign your old clothes. Before you toss anything, check with your locality on any restrictions on tossing out textile/clothing. In Massachusetts for example there are restrictions so they don’t all end up in a landfill.
Plugs. First, you should always label your plugs. It makes it so much easier than going on a treasure hunt while your littles cry when their tablet runs out of juice. If you have plugs of unknown origin, you can put them aside in the same place for a few months. If you haven’t used them by the end of month 3, toss ‘em.
I love these shoe bins. You can get similar 6 quart bins with lids at Target. I label them because it’s so much easier to find the correct pair.
3. Label it. The worst in our house is that we have so many freakin’ totes we don’t know what’s in them. It’s beyond frustrating. Once we had long search for my holiday charger plates for Thanksgiving. Because the totes were only generally labeled, we dind’t find the buried under other Christmas stuff. Now we label everything specifically with what is in them. I do this with my shoes as well. Even though my shoe boxes are clear, I can’t always see what’s in them from the angle I’m looking at. This makes it so much easier to find what I need in a hurry.
4. Add new shelving. We’ve added shelving in the garage recently for all the totes and it has made a huge difference. Instead of just stacking the totes on top of each other, which isn’t the most organized, or safe for that matter, the totes are now neatly stacked right up to the ceiling in the garage. It looks great too!
In my son’s room, his toys were constantly all over the floor. His room is small and there’s not a lot of open wall space in the room, so we built shelves in his closet, leaving room for the clothes to still hang. We bought the bins we wanted, measured them, then added an inch of clearance before installing the shelves. First we installed boards across the length of the closet to ensure we hit the studs in the wall for extra support. Second, we installed brackets to hold the boards and provide extra support. This prevents bowing later if the shelves have a lot of weight on them. We bought nice pine boards that will hold the weight and look nice once they're painted out. The trim around the closet is being updated, and the room painted, but will wait until spring when we can paint the boards. It’s too cold this time of year to try that.
Do you have favorite organizing hacks? Please share them in the comments section below..
This set of 4 food storage containers holds 11lbs (each!). I love these and they make baking so much easier.
Here are a few more organizers that I love:
My pantry holds a lot of my baking supplies. Since Parker and I bake so much more now that the kitchen is renovated, I needed proper storage. The big storage is great for sugar and flour because you always need quite a bit of both when baking.
I love these small containers. The lids are perfect for keeping brown sugar and marshmallows soft.
The smaller containers are great for the things like baking soda, powdered sugar, cornstarch, monk fruit sugar and other items I don’t use quite as often or as much.
