A clean home is so refreshing to walk into. The walls almost seem like they are shining along with your home decor making you feel cozy and organized. However, a lot of the time cleanliness is mistaken for organized. Just because your home is clean doesn't mean it's necessarily organized--or even functional! Here are some ways you can maintain both cleanliness and organization in your living space.
Clear counters in your Kitchen
Clean, empty surfaces always look nice. Especially now with the minimal and simple methods of decor becoming more and more popular. However, just because you clear the surfaces and hide your appliances for a more open look, sometimes this destroys the functionality and organization of your kitchen! Most of the time its much easier to leave the most-used appliances in your kitchen on the counter for both easy access and easy cleaning. Having a designated area for these appliances on your counter in a specific place makes it much easier to clean and stay organized.
Refrigerator Command Center
The fridge is often a focal source of your kitchen. With so much empty space on that big appliance, it's difficult not to just tack on any important reminders, collected magnets, or your child's art projects. While this may seem organized or make you feel like you have a good system going on in your home, but keeping a clean fridge that isn't the main source of your household's information is much more organized. Recommended by
Jeni Aron, a professional organizer, having a clipboard on the kitchen wall with important lists and reminders is both clean and useful as a message board or source of information.
Functional entryway
When first entering your home, you and your guests get a good initial feeling of the way you live. The entryway is the first impression to your household, so of course, you want to make it a good one. A good way to immediately put away belongings and having a good, organized first impression is to have an organized coat closet and storage area right in the front. This way, the belongings you're holding onto do not just sit by the door in a pile and you are capable of grabbing these items on the go as well. A clean, and empty entryway may look very nice, but having these items in storage right when you leave makes you look organized and prepare to leave at any time.
Closet Space
While organizing our closets are always a pain, but incredibly useful. However, sometimes an organized closet might push certain items to the back or into an area where it is hard to access. The most important part of a closet is its functionality and how easy it is for you to reach the items that you use or wear the most. Displaying your favorite dressy or flashy apparel might look nice, but if you don't wear that piece every day then it's more practical to place it in a more out-of-reach place and replace it with your daily sneakers. Just like the kitchen counter recommendation, having a designated space for certain items not only keeps things neat, but is also highly functional.
Cluttered Drawers and Cabinets
Areas might look clean when you first step into them, but who isn't guilty of using
drawers for just items that you have no clue where to put? A lot of the time, shoving random, in-the-way items into drawers makes a room look cleaner, but of course, it isn't really being clean or organized. A good way to organize drawers is to get smaller containers to place inside. This way, you can assign and group certain items to a place in the container in order to more easily find them and have a small tiny space for everything you need. This also makes your drawer look much more visually appealing, rather than a huge, unsorted mess.
Storage Bins
Like above, having methods of storing and organizing is very useful. However, if you have too many storage bins, it becomes confusing for you and cluttered for your space! Having too many storage bins often results in a lack of use for specific ones, turning into a display product rather than a useful bin. If you shop before organizing, you could be left with too many storage bins and not enough to put inside as well. Think smart in terms of using storage bins so that you do not have too many, and don't have too little either.
Digital Housekeeping
There are so many electronics in our homes now that it's almost unavoidable to have chords everywhere! With our TV's connected to so many devices, chords can often become a stringy, thick mess. Create a backing with a foam board to manage the digital aesthetics of your home so that there is no jungle of wires around your electronics. This will not only make these areas more attractive but will also make it look like less of an eyesore.
Bookshelves
If you have small trinkets that you want to put on display, place them with like items in terms of either color scheme, texture, or material. This makes your shelves look more put together, aesthetically pleasing, and organized. Putting more thought into shelf decor definitely shows too! Also, don't display every book you own (if for decorative purposes). Having a large amount of books on your bookshelf takes up unnecessary space. Fewer books on the shelves create more space for decorations and more breathing room. Instead of a packed bookshelf, there is an openness to your bookshelves which could
make a room appear a bit larger as well.
Image Courtesy of Kelly on Flickr