This week I am taking a break from telling you about me in order to tell you about how to get out of organizational ruts. Why? Because people pay me to organize their houses and I love to do it but I love my readers even more. I want to give you guys some free advice on how to get organized. This, of course, necessitates that I talk about some awkward household habits many people have. However, for the record, we are talking about “other people” right? Not you. You would never do these things, I know. If you are reading this article, you are clearly reading it for a friend. #everyone else
Anyway, in the opening lines of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” After nearly six years in the professional organizing business, I can tell you that the opposite is true of houses. People whose houses work well for their family arrange things in a variety of ways. Some store their shoes upstairs and some downstairs. Some love to use bins to contain their stuff and some prefer shelving. Some have very kid-specific areas of the house and some happy families share nearly every space in the home amongst themselves. On the flip side, families who live unhappily in their homes are all alike. The same organizational mistakes are evident every time I go to a house where the mess has gotten baaaaad. I have seen these neatness killers so often, I have become convinced that if families struggling with messiness would just right the four wrongs I am about to list, their homes and lives would be infinitely more organized. Here we go:
- Get thee to Lowe’s for a towel rack and some liquid soap…pronto. Families with messy bathrooms have not thought through the way kids, guests and messy spouses use their bathroom space. Therefore, they have not provided a storage place for the things that will get used. Towels with no wall-mounted rack get thrown on the floor or in the sink. For the love of dry towels, mount a towel rack! It takes no time at all and gives your people a fighting chance at having a clean bathroom to greet them in the morning. Also, dried ovals of bar soap with hair embedded in them do not make for a nice bathroom experience. When things already feel gross, there is little incentive to tidy up. Make the bathroom feel clean by buying liquid soap in a color that looks good in the bathroom. Cleaner vanity? Done.
Your soap should not remind you of Rapunzel. Hairy soap is a red flag. Do not ignore the hairy soap.
- Get rid of at least half of your bags. Had I not grown up in America, my organizing experience would tell me we are dealing with a national bag shortage, making it entirely necessary for us all to hoard bags. People with out of control mess are in the habit of keeping empty bags of all varieties. Plastic grocery bags, the fabric bags you can buy at Michael’s for $1 and trash bags clutter their closets and drawers, crowding out space for stuff that should be living there. Here is a good rule of thumb: if there were ever a zombie apocalypse and each member of your family had to flee the country with only what they could carry, the most any one person could possibly take is a bag for each hand. Keep two fabric bags for each family member and throw the rest away. Keep one wall-mounted container full of plastic bags for messy household jobs. Throw away used trash bags because….ewww. Organized storage spaces? Check.
Bags are your frenemy. Keep them around but not in bulk or they will put you on the shame train.
- You have all seen a filing cabinet and bulletin board before. Make friends with them. These household tools are like the plain Jane girl at school who is actually kind of cool when you bother to talk to her. Messy homes all have paper piles that resemble origami projects gone wrong. Mail is piled up on countertops. School papers are shoved into pantry nooks and shoe closets. Sports schedules become crumply bacteria hubs inside gym bags. Why do people do this? They do it because there is no assigned place for papers and no organized system for running them through the family chain of command; enter the file cabinet looking all cool like the hero that she is. Also, don’t forget to check out her boyfriend the bulletin board. Here’s how it is done: when you bring mail into the house, sort it immediately and trash all the junk. Then go to your filing cabinet/desk file tray/wall pocket and dump all the actionable items in a file labeled “To Do.” Take everything out of the “To Do” bin that has already been dealt with and put it in long-term storage in your filing cabinet. Check your “To Do” file weekly and set aside half an hour a week to address what is inside it. Put a large bulletin board above the filing system with one or two tacks for each kid in the family. When lunch menus and sports schedules come home from school, pin them up on the board. Sign permission slips immediately and put them back in the backpacks. If you want to be really fancy, you can hang a hook by the board, get one of those trusty bags you have been hoarding and put all the after-school activity supplies in the bag. Hang the bag on the hook. Voila! No more karate belts draped over your dining room chairs.
Your papers are not the boss of you. Stand up to paper tyranny and file those little jerks.
- Make a place for half dirties. Let’s be real here. When we wear clothes for just an hour or two a day after work, we don’t always wash them afterwards. We’ll wear them again just a little bit dirty. We all do it. You’re OK and I’m OK…OK? What is not OK is not admitting this pattern to yourself and providing a way to make it work in your home. In extremely messy houses, half dirties often become laundry sculptures in master bedroom chairs. No more, friends. Stop the insanity! Just put a bin or basket in your closet designated for half dirties. When you take them off, fold them and toss them in the bin. They’ll be ready to wear the next day after work but they won’t make you want to shield your eyes when you enter your master bedroom. Sanity restored.
This chair says, “Do not sit on me!” and “By the way, you suck.” Rude.
See how easy, small and simple that was? These tasks take no time at all! They all boil down to thinking about how you are going to maintain a space before the need arises. A little rack, a little bin, and a filing cabinet is all we’re talking about here. Install these systems like your sanity depends on it! Then smile, invite friends over and when they comment on the neatness of your home, tell them the truth. Say something dashing and effortless like, “Oh, I barely spend any time cleaning up!” Aren’t you smart? And Happy!
Linda McKeever says
I love these quick little honest tips and I can’t wait to hear more from your organizing expertise! I will share these tips right away with my “friends.” You are so right about the bags. I know people who have scary numbers of bags and difficulty getting rid of a “good bag.” And the honesty of the half-dirties? Preach sister. We live how we live. I like how you seem to try to organize life just the way it is, imperfect but manageable. I bet you are fun to work with. I’ll recommend you to some of my bag-hourding-half-dirty clothes wearing “friends.” Thanks!
Sally says
Please recycle those bags! Don’t just “throw them away.”
Chuck Barnes says
If only we were as wise …. Dad