Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Clutter Busting Tip - Find the Valuable Real Estate in you Home | Clutterbug Podcast # 16

Episode Date: July 20, 2016

Want your home to stay clutter free and organized for good? There is one tip that is so important to not only getting organized but staying organized!   Say goodbye to clutter on the kitchen counter and on top of dressers with this Clutter Busting Tip!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast today. I wanted to talk about one of my favorite organizing and decluttering, I guess, tips. It really helped me not only get organized, but stay organized for good. And that tip is finding the valuable real estate in your home and using it. I know that might seem, I don't know, like a crazy thing, but here is what I was like organizing for me in the beginning. I would pull everything out of saying. a closet or a cupboard or a drawer and I would put it all back neatly inside containers, sometimes even labeled containers. And what would happen is, you know, a week, a month, a few months later, it would be a total disaster again. And I couldn't figure out why. I couldn't figure out why I would

take the time to organize something, but it wouldn't stay organized or why my surfaces were still really cluttered. So the kitchen counter was always cluttered, the top of my dressers, in the bedrooms were always really cluttered. We have a table like a little armor when you enter the house and it was always cluttered full of stuff and it was just, you know, every time I cleaned it up, it would just get messy again and I didn't understand why. And it wasn't until I heard the theory about finding the valuable real estate and how important it is to actually store your things where you naturally drop them. That sort of a light bulb moment came on and it was like a light bulb moment that really transformed my home and I'm able to keep it organized for good. So I know this is kind of confusing.

So I'm going to give you like a ton of examples to help you really see what I'm talking about. And we'll start with the kitchen. So for me in the kitchen, one of the problem areas that I had was papers. And I know what you're thinking. Papers don't obviously belong in the kitchen. but that is just where I would naturally put them. Not all papers, but things like school, you know, newsletter papers or permission slips, things that needed to be signed, doctor note reminders, to-do lists, grocery lists, even the family calendar. All that stuff just sort of migrated and ended up all the time in the kitchen. And at first it was a pile on the counter, you know, that I would go through all the time. it was a bunch of magnets just basically filling the front of the fridge.

And no matter how many times I tidied it up and went through, it's just, it was cluttered. It was a mess. So what I did is I turned the side of my fridge into a kitchen command center. And I purchased this great accordion file folder. And it has sections for to-do, to call, school papers, you know, a neighborhood phone numbers and playmate phone numbers. It has spots for coupons, all the things that normally. normally would pile on my counter, now I could file them away in this really pretty neat file folder that's small and doesn't take up as much space, but I know where everything is and it's

right in the kitchen where I use it and it's easy to get to. And then I just hung magnets on the side of the fridge with, you know, a shopping list, a perpetual shopping list from indigo, which I love. It's called the all out of pad and it's great and it has a magnetic calendar on the side of the fridge and, you know, to do, no tearaways that are stuck on the side of the fridge. And it's just all the things that would otherwise be a pile on my counter is now really organized and has a home. So usually people do this finding the valuable real estate in their home and their kitchen naturally. So you're going to keep your plates close to the dishwasher or close to the table where you set it. You're going to keep your water glasses close to the tap, to the sink.

you're going to keep your coffee above your coffee maker that's on the counter. So assigning the real estate is picking the spot in your home where the things should be long. And the real valuable real estate key here is using the spot that's the easiest to access so your upper cabinets are easier to access than your lower ones. And the bottom shelf of your upper cabinets are the easiest to access. so that is where you should keep the things you use the most often. And the things you use the least often should be in a harder-to-reach spot. And especially in the kitchen, the things that we hardly use at all shouldn't even be in our kitchen.

And the reason is our kitchen is the most used spot in our home. It is the most valuable real estate. And we need every square inch of it. So if you've got giant roasting pans that you only use once a year, or, you know, a rice cooker that gets used only occasionally. Those things should be located somewhere else. They should be, you know, in a closet somewhere or in a garage. You don't have to get rid of them, but they don't need to be taking up the valuable real estate in

your kitchen. And by taking out these big items that you're not using on a regular basis, storing them somewhere else, you can make room for things that are on your counter that you use every day. Like the toaster can have a special spot in an easy-to-access cabinet. and the blender, all those piles of things that don't have space in your kitchen, will magically have space. So that's really how in my pretty small kitchen I was able to stay clutter-free all the time. It's because everything has a home that's really easy to access.

And the things I access every single day are in the most easiest spots. So even though that is pretty self-explanatory, it's pretty simple, you would be surprised how many people do not do this, including myself. Let's talk about my master bathroom. It's pretty much in a perpetual state of mess. And I've organized and reorganized a thousand times, but it wasn't until I went back to this whole thing of looking at my space as valuable real estate, that it changed for good, that it was able to stay organized for good.

So what I did is I took everything out of my medicine cabinet in my mind, In my bathroom, it's very tiny. And the medicine cabinet is the easiest thing to access. So that's where I opened it up and I looked and saw first of all what was in there. And there was like perfume and lotion and hairspray. Stuff I never use. I hardly ever use. I don't want to get rid of my expensive perfumes because I do use them when we go out or something like that. But it's not a daily thing. Yet it was all of these things were taking up half of the space in the easiest to access medicine cabinet, you know, compartment in my bathroom. And that made no sense at all. Instead, I moved in the things I use every single day. I gave them more space on the inside the

medicine cabinet, so it was easier to put them away. It was easier to take them out. And I just relocated the things I use maybe once a month to another spot. And you can move them to another spot in the bathroom that's harder to access or even a hall closet, your bedroom closet in a labeled bin. There's so many ways that you can make space. It doesn't have to necessarily be stored in the room that it needs to be if it's not used on a regular basis. So now I put all the things that I access all the time in the medicine cabinet. That means, you know, every day, twice a day. Toothbrush, face lotion that doesn't really do anything. I'm still super wrinkled. The vitamins I take every day. That has the most prominent and easy to get to spot in my bathroom,

and then all the other stuff is a little bit harder to get to. So hopefully this makes sense to you. It is a little bit confusing, but once you get started, you will see such a transformation, and probably the easiest way to sort of identify areas that need to have more accessible home and looking at the piles of clutter in your house. So just taking a step back and looking,

where your problem areas are, maybe you have a pile of mail piled up on your kitchen counter. That's probably the spot that you should have a mail sorting system. And maybe you need to relocate something that's already there or clean out a drawer right underneath of there and make that your mail sorting drawer or cabinet or cupboard or purchase a little something that you can put right there on the counter. If you're finding that kids' toys are always in your living room upstairs, they're dragging them out of their bedroom and they're putting them in the living room, that's probably a good indicator that maybe you need to clean out a spot under the coffee table and put some bins and baskets of kids' toys. So it's easy for them to put away and store just a few in the living room. There's so many examples. Another example is a lot of people will take off their clothes when they get home and they're not too. dirty, but they're not clean enough to hang back up, so they'll like pile them on the dresser. They'll just like toss their worn pants or jeans on the dresser.

Why not, you know, hang a hook nearby, hang a bunch of hooks, a series of hooks for clean, but not clean enough to go away close. We've done that behind our bedroom door, and no longer do we have piles of clothing taking up surfaces in our bedroom on top of the dresser and things like that. Another thing that we used to do all the time that was an issue in our bedroom on top of our dresser was, you know, rings that my husband would take off, things he would empty from his pockets before bed, money change, that sort of thing. And it was a mess. We could have got a tray, but instead the top drawer of our dresser, we relocated the things in the top drawer of the dresser and we put some trays and some bins inside that top drawer.

that way we're still able to have sunglasses and change and business cards and all the random stuff that would otherwise be piled on top of the dresser it has a home it's just now inside a drawer that it's properly you know organized into sections so it's still a mess in there i guess but it doesn't look like a cluttered mess and it's so much easier to dust and clean so that's basically the whole principle that i wanted to uh get across to it's real it is hard to explain. But finding the valuable real estate and using it properly is pretty much key to keeping a self-cleaning house, to having a house that is just in a perpetual state of tidy. And it's because it's easy to put the stuff back. That's really what it comes down to. It is so easy to put things away

when it has a certain home for it to go in. And it's easy to put that thing into its home. It also saves you time when you're accessing those things. You know where everything is and it's easy to find it. It does mean that you're going to have to relocate some things, perhaps donate things and rearrange a few things here and there. But the time invested in doing this is so worth it. So I would recommend you look around your house, you find a something, a pile of clutter somewhere and you start there with that pile. really identify what it is that's in that pile, why it's there. And perhaps if you can find a convenient spot to store that stuff near where the pile is. Maybe you need to pull some stuff out of your kitchen and put it in the garage.

Maybe you need to get another bin and put it in your living room and find a home for it and relocate, you know, books or something like that. And you'll see it's pretty much magic. So today, spend some time. find your valuable real estate in your home, rearrange things just because things have a home, doesn't mean it's the proper home. And you've probably made that home when you first moved in. You know, you're unpacking everything on moving day and you put everything away in your kitchen. Just because that's where the glasses are now doesn't mean that's the best spot for the glasses in your kitchen.

Take the time to rearrange them, make your home more functional, and identify your valuable real estate today. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.