Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - What an Organized Home REALLY looks like! | Clutterbug Podcast # 63

Episode Date: September 7, 2018

In this podcast, I discuss what an organized home REALLY looks like! I also share some easy tips to actually make it happen!    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today we're talking about what an organized home actually looks like. So thanks so much for joining me. Let's talk about organization and what it looks like. And honestly, what it doesn't look like. Having a tidy and clean house that doesn't have anything like laying anywhere, that does not mean that you're an organization. person. That is not what the definition of an organized home is. It doesn't matter what it looks

like because if you're like me and I was a ladybug, a hidey hoarder, I am a ladybug, but I was a hidey hoarder, every closet, every drawer under my bed, the storage room was a disaster. So even though my house looked really neat and tidy, it was all a lie. I was just shoving and hiding things out of sight so it appeared to be really clean and tidy, but it was never organized. And the reason it wasn't organized was because I could never find anything, nor could I easily put things away in the designated home. If I needed to find something, I had to make a mess to find it. And so I wasn't organized. And I grew up like that. I come from a long line of ladybugs. My grandmother prides herself on a really clean, beautiful, immaculately tidy home. Do not open a closet. Do not ask her to, you know, get a garbage bag

because she's going to have to look around for where it could possibly be. And my mom is exactly the same way. I grew up in a house where it was completely normal to have to hunt for the keys every single morning, the car keys. I grew up in a house where we were constantly rummaging through drawers looking for bills that had to be paid or papers that had to be signed to go back to school. I was losing shoes and clothing and everything. My mom would hide things quickly out of sight when cleaning, but nothing had a designated home. So we never knew where anything was. If you need a pen, still to this day, if you need a pen at my mom's house, she will have to look in like five different drawers that are chocked full of junk and test all the pens to see which ones work. Most of

of them don't, and then she'll toss the dead, dried out pens back into the drawer to play the game again the next time she needs a pen. If you were to go to my mom's house right now and look in her fridge, you will not be able to find the ketchup. You will have to take things out and look around. There will be at least three half-empty containers of ketchup on the go in there. Just everything is like that, and I grew up like this and I am a ladybug too, so I have this natural tendency to sort of hide things out of sight. So that's a real misconception that people have that if your house looks neat and tidy, that you're an organized person. Because there's a big difference between being organized and having a tidy home on the outside. And the same can be said the other way.

So if you're a visual organizer, if you're a butterfly or a bee and you have a lot of things on your counter and you have open shelving that is filled with things, but it's really organized. It may not look the traditional way that we think of an organized home. It may look cluttered. But the truth is, if you can find things and easily put things back, that is what organization is all about. So let's talk about what it really looks like, what an organized home, what organization really, really looks like and what it means. Basically, what it means. is you never have to spend more than a few minutes tidying your home. Your home will never get so out of control that it doesn't take you more than 10, 15 minutes

to quickly tidy a room because everything in that space has a really easy home to put those things back. So when people are really struggling, you know, cleaning the house, I'm using air quotes you can't see because it's a podcast. When they're spending a lot of time tidying, it's normally because one, they have too much stuff and two, they don't have a place for that stuff to go that's really easy, that they can just put it back right away. So what they're doing is like, you know, moving things around and they're trying to find spaces for things and they're wasting so much time managing things that have no place to go. And they're doing this on a constant basis. So when you have a truly organized home, things, I mean, still get messy. Of course they do. You live in

your house, you dirty dishes and your kids play with toys and you do crafts. And I mean, today I decorated for fall and I brought all my fall totes out and the whole house was a total mess. But it only took me 20 minutes to put everything away because everything has a designated home. That's really simple to just put all back into place. So that's the first thing of what an organized home looks like. It doesn't take you a long time to tidy it. The second thing that an organized home looks like. The second feature of an organized home is you never lose anything. Let me tell you, I spent years, basically my entire life, until the age of 28, every single day looking for things. When I became a stay-at-home mom and was running a daycare, there wasn't one day of my life

where I didn't have that panicked feeling of not being able to find something. Keys, sunglasses, my phone, my purse, the umbrella, because it's raining, my daughter's extra shoe, you know, gifts that I had found and hidden somewhere and couldn't find. It didn't matter what it was. It was always something. And every time I had to look for things, I had this, you know, stress and anxiety feeling and I would tear my drawers apart or tear the closet apart. I know what's in here. And there were so many times that I actually thought, could I, could it have been stolen? Could I have been robbed. I mean, this is, this is where my brain went. Like, somebody would break into my home and only steal the umbrella. But I had this just high level of stress and anxiety on a daily

basis because I was misplacing things and forgetting to pay bills and forgetting it about appointments and being late all the time. It was just in a constant state of like frantic hot messness. Is that a word? No, it isn't. But we're going to use it as a word today. I just, yeah, it was. It was crazy pants. Now, I can't even tell you the last time that something was misplaced because everything has a home that's really simple and easy and everyone in the house knows where it is because it's labeled. Yeah, I go overboard on the labeling. But that way my husband and my kids and myself has a reminder of where things is and everything has a home. The biggest thing that an organized home, the biggest feature of an organized home is having.

less stuff. A truly organized home has really just the things that they use and love. I am not a minimalist by any means and I'm constantly still purging my home. Purging, purging. And I cannot believe the amount of stuff that I've taken out of my home over the years. And I'm still finding things. But it's so much better. I can't believe. I mean, we acquire things. We acquire things. We acquire Why are things at Christmas and birthdays and just out shopping? And if we're not getting rid of things from our home at the same rate, it does not take long to completely fill up our home. So my husband and I had lived in our home for, you know, five years together,

and I had never purged. So five years of Christmas gifts and birthday gifts and gifts and gifts for the kids and me just shopping and all the little things you pick up here and there. Maybe it's only one tiny thing a month. but those add up really quickly to a ton of stuff. And the older you are, the more years you've had to accumulate things in your home. And it becomes impossible to know where everything is and have an easy home for everything because you just have too much stuff.

So it definitely comes back to the first thing is having a proper home for everything. And everybody says that this is the definition of organization, a home for everything and everything in its home. and nothing is always in its home in my house. I mean, right now that the kids have dirty towels that they've probably left on the bathroom floor. The kids' backpacks are not hanging on the hooks. They're on the floor.

Don't ask me why. You know, I'm looking at my office right now. I have papers all over the desk that I need to deal with. But all of those things would take just a few minutes to put back. And that's the difference. That's the difference from me today and me eight years ago. Cass eight years ago would have to shove and hide and move things around and and frantically look for places for things to go and then the next day forget where I shoved and hid and put those things and

have to look for them and it was this vicious cycle of crazy and I know I'm not alone I know because I see my mom do it every time I go to visit I see my grandmother do it and I see so many of my clients who are struggling the same way just not having a proper home for for everything. So that is what an organized home looks like. And it really starts with knowing your style. It really does. For me, I tried setting up these really complicated systems. I'll never forget. I went to the container store. My oldest daughter, I think, was four and Abby was two. And we drove to London just to go to the container store because I was like, I'm getting organized. I had made it up in my mind and we had spent it was my birthday money so we spent like two hundred and fifty dollars that

I had gotten as gifts and saved up for from my birthday money on these containers these beautiful stacking containers so I could organize my linen closet and they were pretty small I mean they were bigger than a food storage container but not really and they stacked and they were pink I remember that I was like ah beautiful pink containers and I went home and I sorted all my pain relievers into one little pink container and all the antacids into one and all like the band-aids into one and I had like dozens of these adorable pink containers all stacked on my shelf and it looked beautiful. I even labeled them with a label maker and it lasted about a week because the next time my kid scratched her knee and needed a band-aid I'd have to take unstack them get the band-aid

one out take the lid off get the band-aids out give her a band-aid and then I would just toss the Band-Aid package back in the closet, not in the container. And I would not restack them. And so anytime I needed an aspirin or anything that was in these pretty containers, they would never go back. I was way too. I'm just, I'm not a detail person. I'm more looking at the big picture. My brain is already moved on. I'm not going to maintain it. So it was messy again. So those homes for those things, that was not the right home. So number one, that people are making is they don't know their style and they're not working with their style. I need one open container that's like first aid and literally everything that has to do with like

you're hurt, you need a bandaid, you need an aspirin, it's all tossed into first aid. It's all the same because that's the way I put it away. It's not about finding things that's hard for me. If I know I need an aspirin, I dig around in the first aid bin. It's the putting away where I really struggled. So that's how I overcame that. So once you know your style, it's so easy to create homes for those things. Another mistake that people make when they're organizing their home is they are creating the right type of home for their stuff. But they're making it too far away to actually be usable. And what I mean by this is I cannot tell you how many clients of mine have set up mail systems.

So the places that they want their mail to go in their home office on the same. second floor only to struggle with paper on their kitchen counter or school papers on their kitchen counter and i would say to them well where does this go and they'd say well the bills they go upstairs in in the office and the kids you know school papers they go in a binder that's also in the office and the the drawings that they bring home they'd go in the memory binder but where is their intern place where's the place where they go until you have the change to put them in the places, their long-term places. So just like paper needs a short-term home or an action file in a long-term, lots of other things in our house do as well. So yeah, have a basket on your

kitchen counter. Have a little mail sorting system when you first come in to your entrance way, where you put bills to be paid and school papers that need to be signed and artwork that needs to be filed away in their memory binders. You need to create homes for that type of stuff or else it quite literally is homeless clutter. Even if it has a long-term home, you're not going to take the time to walk in the door and walk your mail all the way upstairs to the office. That's just not realistic. So it's important that we create homes for those clutter hot spots. Another example is in our home was tools. We're constantly doing like little home maintenance projects. So even if it's something small like changing the batteries of a kid's toy or something bigger like

hanging a picture or fixing something small, I was always going out to the garage to get the tools because that's where our tool chest is. I would bring them in to use them and then I would leave them on the kitchen counter because I wasn't going to walk them all the way back to the garage. And so this was a real mess for us was having tools. So we made a spot. We made a spot. We had some old tools that we brought in as house tools. I even have a little drill that I'd keep right upstairs in a closet by the kitchen. It has a little bag with a hammer and a bunch of screwdrivers and wire cutters and have measuring tape and all the little tools that I was running back and forth maybe monthly to get from the garage. It was adding up to clutter. So now we have

a spot for that stuff right in the house and it's no longer an issue. So look at your house and and look at your hot spots, look at the things that tend to pile and think, how can I create a home for that stuff really close by to where I naturally pile it? The other thing I see very, very often is with kids. Kids, you know, have a messy room or their toys in their toy room are messy, or the toys in the living room are messy. When I ask the parents, where do they go? Where do you put these toys away. It's usually two spots. One is a pile in the corner. I kid you not. So many families just stack all the kids' toys in a pile in the corner or they put them in a toy box. And here's the problem with those type of organizing systems. When a kid wants to go play again, they know the toy

that they want to play with. If it's a toy box, they have to dump it out or take everything out to find the toy they want and if it's a pile they have to dig through the pile to find stuff to play with. So what they end up doing is creating a huge mess and then you're constantly doing that cycle again. Clean up your mess and they shove it all back in a toy box or they put it all back in a pile and then they need something again so they have to tear it apart. And it's basically, it's basically me with my closets eight years ago when I needed the umbrella. Right? I would have to dig through to find the umbrella. I'd have everything pulled out of the closet and a huge pile in the front entrance way and then I have to shove everything back to put it away.

So that's not training our kids. It's not showing them what proper organization looks like. And what proper organization looks like is having a home for everything and everything in its home. So we have to sort the kids' toys and give them a container, a home for each of those different categories. So one for Barbies, one for Lego, or if you have lots of Lego, one for each color of Lego, or lots for different Legos, a bin for cars, a bin for dress-up, a bin for doctor's kits,

and label them with picture labels, make a proper home for your kids' toys, put them on a bookshelf, or even line them up in the corner. But as soon as you have that sorted system where it's really obvious where things go, they're not going to make as big of a mess, and they're going to be able to tidy it up in a fraction of the time. And that's the secret of what a number. organized home looks like, not just for kids' toys, but every single thing in your home, everything from the scissors you cut your paper with to the stamps that you put when you're mailing

your envelopes to the pen you need to sign the check. Everything has to have a designated home. That's really close to where you use it and really simple to put away. So there is my quick podcast. Actually, it's long for you guys today about what organization looks like. And it may seem overwhelming, especially if you're like I was and you just have stuff everywhere and nothing has any rhyme or reason. I'm not going to tell you that it can be done overnight because it is a process, but I can tell you that it's worth it. Every day, spend 15 minutes picking one thing.

Maybe today it's light bulbs. You collect all the light bulbs in your home. You put them in one container. You label it light bulbs. and you find a home for that. And maybe tomorrow it's batteries. And maybe the next day it's tools. And maybe the day after that it's incoming mail.

And every day you pick some small category in your home to create a home for. And before you know it, your entire house is going to be organized. And you're going to save yourself so much time. Every day for the rest of your life is going to be easier. You're going to have more time. You're going to be able to just never have to look for things. ever again. And it's constantly going to stay pretty tidy, or at least only take a few minutes to clean. And that's what organization is all about. So I wanted to share that with you. Thank you guys

so much for listening. And I'll see you next time.