ALL-ROUND ORGANIZING TIPS FOR YOUR HOME

Everybody loves a neat and tidy home which has been smartly laid out. Living spaces should be functional, beautiful, and used to their optimal capacity. But it's easy to be fooled into thinking that a lack of space essentially amounts to a lack of options as far as smart organization is concerned.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is possible to perk up your home decor, organize things well, and maximize storage-all in one way.

You don't have to spend a lot of money doing it either. Your local supermarket could sort you out with most of the things required for this purpose. You could also use existing items in your house and create smart solutions out of them. (We'll show you how.)

In this post we are bringing to you some of the best home organization tips for your home from a variety of sources. Whether it's your living room, bedroom, kitchen, or even your yoga corner, there's enough material in this post to be your go-to solution when faced with storage and organization challenges.

What you will need

• Loads of organizing bins
• Wicker baskets
• Storage boxes
• Crates
• Old refrigerator vegetable baskets
• Ice cube trays
• Old jars, glasses, and mugs

In the unlikely event that you don't already have any baskets, boxes, or crates in your house you can get all of them for cheap at Target, Walmart, or the Dollar Store.

So let's get started then.

Storage Tips for the Living Room

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Living rooms are the first port of call for visitors. We spend thousands of dollars making sure we have charming living rooms and they set the tone for what to expect in the rest of the house.

While we pay a lot of attention to the decor of our living rooms, we don't think much about its storage capacity. Since most living rooms are big, it makes sense to tap into all of that space smartly and maximize its storage capacity, without making it look like it's been run down.

Here are few ways you can accomplish that:

• If you already have wall-to-wall shelves in your living room, you're in luck. You could make the most of the lower shelves by stocking them with organizers and baskets.But if you don't have many shelves to speak of, no worries. Use the space underneath the tables in your room (as indicated in the picture above) and place lovely wicker baskets over there. You can put anything you want in the baskets since they aren't going to be transparent.
• Wall hangings are another excellent idea to free up space from the shelves and the tables. Move your magazines, newspapers, and other light things over to the wall hangings and use the shelves for something else.
• If your room is devoid of shelves entirely and if you have a couple of empty walls in your living room, you might want to get long shelves installed on them. Shelves come in a tremendous variety and are an extremely handy way to add storage to a room.

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Even corner shelves are a great storage expanding solution for living rooms. They don't get in your way and make use of an otherwise wasted space.

Organization Tips for the Kitchen

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• If you're fond of cooking, chances are you have a ton of bottles and jars of spice, herbs, condiments, and the like in your kitchen cabinets. But that also means that when you actually start cooking you have to sometimes take out a number of bottles to find the one you are looking for. It's annoying, to say the least.Revolving storage bins are a smart solution for this. They will save you a lot of time and hassle when you are looking for one condiment in a sea of jars.
• Set up assorted baskets. If you have enough space in your cabinets, you can set up dedicated boxes or baskets according to the material they hold. For instance, one basket for all the material related to Italian cooking, another for Mexican cooking, and so on. This ensures you do not have to spend a lot of time fishing out the required ingredients when you're in a jiffy, and also makes it easier for you to put things back in their right place.
• Rack up the insides of your kitchen cabinet doors to stock towels and kitchen rolls.
• Vertical stacks in your cabinets are a great way to store your dishes and bowls. That allows you to make the most use of the space inside the cabinets.
• Vertical storage is a great idea throughout as if frees up a lot of space. Another example, instead of storing boxes and boxes of different kinds of teabags, why not empty them all into one tall and transparent jar? That will take lesser space and you will be able to spot your teabags easily too. If you have an old cookie jar lying around, put it to use now!

Organization tips for the Bedroom

The closet takes the place of pride in most bedrooms, so there's where you begin, and then move on.

• We have devoted an entire blog post to how to set up awesome and functional closets. The best we can do here is direct you to that post for all your closet organization needs.
• How can you maximize what your bed offers? Do you have any space under your bed? Wow, that's just what we wanted to hear! You probably have some suitcases and sundry items thrown in there, too. Leave the suitcases alone (we are assuming they are already stuffed) and take the assorted items out. By now we are hoping you already know what to do next. Yep, bring out a few storage containers (preferably bins with wheels) and put all your items in them. Label the containers if you want. A bit of care now will make retrieval super easy later on.It's a bit like choosing the aisle seat each time you are on a long haul flight. Makes getting up and going to the loo that much easier!
• If you have got more books than your shelves can hold, you might want to turn them into bedroom decor, especially the big hardbacks.

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• For seating space, turn a shelf on its side and foam it up with a bright cover (as shown in the picture above). The storage space stays as it is plus you get a place to sit on!
• Be seasonal in your organization. Only keep things and toiletries relevant for the season on your dresser; put everything else in old jars and containers, and move to the lower drawer of your dresser.

Here are some more tips to keep your bedroom tidy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn-cYkAYYbY

The video is more than worth a look. It's got some really ingenious tips to care for the little things in your bedroom, which, if left cluttered soon become a daunting mess. For instance, did you know that you could turn ice cube trays from your freezer into an organizing tray for your jewelry? Yep. Anybody who owns jewelry knows the dreaded feeling when you are reaching out for your chandeliers, only to find them horribly tangled with fifteen other things. Now thanks to this tip, you could finally bid tangled jewelry goodbye!

Organizing the Bathroom

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So what do you keep in your bathroom?

If you already have a few cabinets or shelves, great! Personally, I prefer a minimalistic bathroom in light shades. That's one place where I have absolutely no patience for clutter. So this is what I do to ensure that I have a neat-looking bathroom to start my week with.

• Small organizing bins and old glass jars are life savers if you have no intentions of stepping out of the house on a cold and frosty Saturday morning when you finally decide to tidy up your bathroom. So if you've got an old favorite mug that you are no longer drinking from, import it into your bathroom.
• As suggested in this bathroom organization video, stick a couple of magnetic tapes or strips on one of the walls of your bathroom cabinets and let your often used steel things-like tweezers, nail cutters, safety pins, and scissors keep stuck on them.
• Use old mugs to store your toothbrushes, eye pencils, eyeliners, lip liners, lip sticks, makeup brushes and all the long-stemmed things that you are in the process of reaching out to often in your bathroom. You can fill the mugs with sand or grains of rice to keep your pencils stuck in place, as suggested in the above-linked video.
• Hanging storage is a great option for those who don't have many shelves installed in their bathrooms. You don't need to make any changes to the physical structure of the space, just get one of these and hang them in a good place. You can tuck in towels, underwear, sanitary napkins, and a lot of other stuff into it. You can also label each section for easy retrieval of things.

Organization for the Spare Room

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People have spare rooms in their homes for different reasons. Why do you have yours for?

Does it double up as a yoga corner, a meditation room, a home office, or to accommodate guests with inflatable beds? Whatever your purpose, if it's a space within your house you should be setting it up optimally. Here's how:

• Your purpose itself is the best indicator of how to set up the spare room. If it's a yoga corner, you keep it minimally stocked. It should be spacious, which means there shouldn't be too much of the bulky furniture in it. Let wicker storage baskets line the floor along the walls and rest your folded mat on top of them. (A windchime would be a great addition to the room!)
• If your spare room serves as your daughter's retreat when she is back from college, don't stock it up with too many irrelevant things. Leave a corner or two that she can personalize when she's home.
• Categorizing, organizing, and labeling become even more important when you are storing things in rooms you aren't going to be using on a daily basis. Whether you have stored things in suitcases, baskets, or drawer-wise, you should ideally label them all for everybody's easy reference.
• You can also take out old refrigerator vegetable baskets and stock them with things that you have no idea what to do with but don't want to throw away yet. Let them make their way to the spare room where they remain tucked away neatly till the time they will be of use next.

Conclusion

We hope the above has inspired you enough to devise some smart storage solutions of your own. This can actually be a fun weekend activity, so why don't you start with implementing some of the above-mentioned tips this weekend itself?

While we don't recommend you buy any new furniture just to gain some more storage space, but we do suggest that next time you're planning to buy a bed side table, a coffee table, or a closet, make sure you only buy furniture that gives you a lot of storage options. Anything you buy should contain many drawers or shelves, as these come in supremely handy.

Since you are going to be using storage boxes and baskets a lot, we suggest getting them in different colors and patterns to add a dash of style to your decor. If you don't want to spend any money on new storage containers, transform old ones into something exciting with a bit of DIY magic and they'd be as good as new. Organization doesn't have to be boring!