Fast Tip Friday: One Room at a Time

I promise we’ll be returning to regularly scheduled programming soon. I’m sure that you’re getting a little tired of seeing my messy house so I’m going to try to change things up a little bit. But in order to do that I need to do things like this. My entranceway for the past week has been the place where we drop all the random bags and boxes we’re still bringing over from the Tower, and we haven’t really had much opportunity to deal with it. So when you walk into the house your first impression is one of utter chaos.

Organizing your home can seem overwhelming at first, especially if like me you have just moved and you’re dealing with a whole lot of extra space and no idea what to do with it all. It’s hard to know where to start, so it’s easy to get distracted: you move something into another room, realize that something in that room needs to be organized/put away/cleaned/moved elsewhere, and then it just snowballs and after a few hours you’re exhausted and you realize you’ve accomplished NOTHING.

For instance, there is no need for a large stand mixer to sit in my front hall.

So my trick is to take it one room at a time. First, you take the things that don’t belong in that room and put them elsewhere. Not just any elsewhere, mind you: put them in the room where they belong, and, if it’s something you can do quickly, put them away where they should go. If it’s not a quick job, just stash the whatever-it-is in the room where it should be and go back to the room you’re working on. You can deal with putting the whatever-it-is away properly when you finish what you’re doing and move to a new room.

Before you know it, the room will be empty of all that does not belong and you can now find space for all the things that DO belong.

This is not the final form for this entrance way by any means: this is our old kitchen table and I don’t know what I’m going to do with any of these things. But now the space is clear and looks a little bit more like an entranceway should. It’s still a work in progress, but now that I’ve done this room I can move on to another, and then another, until finally the whole place is done. One down, several more to go …