With Winter months in full swing, you may find yourself looking for things to do around the house. Instead of waiting for the new year and busting out the same resolutions as you do every year, take some time to get organized now.
We recommend working room by room, this way you can really dedicate the time to planning out what organization methods will work best for you and your family.
A few things to keep in mind before you start organizing:
Organize before you buy.
- We often think if we buy a bunch of organizational tools, supplies, and furniture that organizing will be easier. If you don’t know what you need organized, or how you want to, then how will you know what will work best?
Think function, then form.
- Remember that the point to organizing your home, is to make your day to day a little bit easier. So keep your daily functions and habits in mind when planning out your organization.
With those in mind, let’s start with the kitchen. Ask yourself some starter questions as you gear up to organize your culinary space:
- Do you cook a lot? What types of utensils and pots or pans do you use the most?
- Do members of your family need access to certain things? Snacks for kids after school, lunch meat for the day-before-meal prep, etc.
- What are some things in your kitchen you use every day that you find hard to put away after washing? Sport bottles, coffee to go cups, Tupperware, or maybe mugs?
- What spices do you use the most, or have the most of?
Once you have a general idea of what you need to organize, let’s explore some easy things you can do to improve your kitchen!
1. Hang Up Your Mugs
There are several Do-It-Yourself ways you can creatively do this, but there are also some great products you can buy that can make this easy.
2. Use Risers
There are several sizes and colors of these wire rises that you can use in almost every cabinet in your kitchen. Use them for pots and pans, different sized plates, cups, snacks; you name it, you can stack it.
3. Organize Sport and Water Bottles
If you have an active, on-the-go, family, you’ve probably collected a great amount of sport bottles, travel mugs, or water bottles. With so many, they can be as difficult to organize as trying to keep your tupperware containers in order. Rest assured, there are ways to tackle this! For example, you can use plastic bins like these:
See more organization tips From Overwhelmed to Organized!
Or you can use wine bottle plastic racks like these:
Or you can use file folder or magazine holders like this:
You can also use hanging shoe organizers and hang it over the back of your pantry door.
- Pro-Tip: You can also use these to hold garbage bags and cleaning supplies underneath your sinks. Just cut the hanging organizer in half, or whatever sizes will fit your cabinets.
4. Snacks and More Snacks
When it comes to snacks, like chips, crackers, fruit snacks, and so on, it can get overwhelming to find a place for all of them; Especially if you want some of them to be in easy accessible locations for smaller kids.
There are actually a variety of things you can use to organize snacks. From installing actual chip clip racks like these, or using plastic bins like you saw being used in the sports bottle section, or the hanging shoe organizers would work well, too!
You can also get more creative and use hanging or standing planters, or stackable bins like those used in schools. These are great for fruit, bagged snacks, or crackers.
5. Cork Boards Inside Cabinets
Cork boards are typically thought of in terms of offices, dorm rooms, classrooms, and club houses. But, did you know that you could use those cork board squares you see at Target inside your kitchen cabinets? These could be used to store measuring spoons, recipes, calendars, keys, and more.
6. Lazy Susans and Shower Caddys
Lazy Susans are probably by far the most underrated organizational solution. For spices, condiments, bathroom necessities, cleaning supplies, and more, they are a great way to free up space. They’re also a great way to make getting what you need a bit more fun. I mean, let’s be honest, who wouldn’t love to spin around to the spices they need instead of just looking over a bunch of labels and trying to find what’s in back?
Shower caddys are the next underrated organization solution. From snacks to cleaning products, shower caddys offer multiple levels of storage. You can also use these to organize car cleaning supplies, or those creative supplies kids use to draw!
7. Dollar Store Finds and Command Hooks
As you’ve seen above, a lot of these items are actually pretty easy to find in a dollar or discount store. You can find bins, jars, trays, shower caddys, and more. You can also find Command hooks, or off brand hooks, to use for pot and pan tops, snacks, bottles, and so on. Check out this great list of 15 Brilliant Things You Can Do with Command Hooks.
Photo Source: LifeHacker
8. Towel Holders
Most people stroll through Target or Home Goods and see towel racks and just walk right by them. But these are actually great for almost any room in your home. From kitchens for mugs and towels, to garages for tools and storage, to even your kids’ rooms for toys, art supplies, and clothes. Add these easy to install racks to every room and see how you can make them work to your advantage:
9. Awkward Spaces... Or Optimal Spaces?
Spaces in your home that you may think are a waste a space, could be utilized to your advantage. Add some floating shelves above, or even next to, your washer and dryer, build, or buy, a roll out spice rack to fit between your fridge and the wall, utilize the space above your kitchen cabinets, or even make use of the corners.
10. Bakeware Beware!
Using file folder organizers to hold bakeware can actually making grabbing your baking pans a lot easier. You can also use this as an opportunity to build your own shelves, and incorporate DIY shelves.
Hopefully this gives you some ideas that can work for organizing your home! If you’re looking to remodel your home, keep some of these in mind too, built in shelves and utilizing spare space could save you time later. Have more organized ideas to add? Share with us in the comments or on our Facebook page!