Life with teens and tweens can be busy, hectic and sometimes far from organised! But the good news is, with a few easy tips and tricks from our home organization guru Sarah Shanahan, calm can be restored and clutter and chaos relegated to nothing more than a distant memory. Check out her rules for streamlining and simplifying your home.
Visualise how you want your home to look and feel
Take a walk through each room of your home. Look around and identify which objects are blocking your goal of achieving the clutter free, calm home you want. Look again and form a picture in your mind of how it would look without those items. When you can visualise it you will work harder trying to achieve it.
Love it, need it, want it?
Decluttering can sometimes seem overwhelming, so take a deep breath and start small. Begin with a drawer, a messy corner or a cupboard. Take everything out and for each item ask yourself this: ‘Do I love it, need it or want it?’ If not donate, sell or dispose of it properly. If it doesn’t bring you joy AND you don’t need it, it goes!
A place for everything, and everything in its place
This is the most important rule I live by. Every single item in your home, whether big or small, needs a home. Anything that doesn’t have a home is just clutter. Clutter is, essentially, a collection of things lying about in an untidy state. Value your possessions. Respect them by having a designated place for them. If you don’t value it enough to have a home for it, it’s just clutter and it needs to go.
Zone your home
Define the different areas within your home and have the appropriate storage in each area. Everything, from the pantry in the kitchen to the toy storage in your living area, needs to be zoned. When the lines are blurred with zoning your home, clutter creeps in. Suddenly kitchen bench tops are holding newsletters, bills and medicines, while the dining table is swamped with piles of laundry waiting to be folded. Get into the habit of only having mail and paperwork in the study, and only sorting washing in the laundry. Stick to this rule strictly and you will quickly notice how peaceful and calm the house becomes.
Baskets!
I’m a sucker for a gorgeous basket, they make a home so warm and inviting and are obviously perfect for storage. I have baskets for everything in my home, to zone my pantry, store shoes, toys, toilet paper, miscellaneous objects that creep onto the kitchen bench, magazines and DVDs, the list goes on! Things are so much better in a basket than just lying around. They provide instant style!
regular stock take
Use each school holiday break as a chance to regroup and take stock of how the house is running. Go through every cupboard, take everything out, wipe it down and put what is appropriate back in. Kids grow out of clothes and toys so quickly and it feels good to give items away to the needy. If you have younger children who will eventually use them, box them up, label and store them, rather than wasting precious space now.
Get the kids on board
If the children know how the house runs, life will be a lot smoother. Give them responsibility for cleaning up their stuff at the end of each day and it will eventually become a lifelong habit. Zone the linen press and label each section so they can be responsible for their own bedroom and bathroom essentials.
Keep it simple
A simple, organised home is a happy home. People often ask me how my home always looks so calm and tidy with four kids. It’s simple, I only have in my home what I need, use and love. Life is too short to fill your home with things you don’t need. I want to enjoy my home with my family in a calm, clutter-free environment, anything else would drive me crazy!
