Guide to Organizing Your Home Once and For All: When You Don’t Know Where to Begin, Start Here.

Organizing your home is a journey, not a destination, and progress is more important than perfection.

We've all been there—promising ourselves that one day we'll get our homes organized, only to see that day continuously pushed into the future. Organizing can feel like an overwhelming task, an elusive skill reserved for a select few. But fear not! In this guide, we’ll help dispel the myth about “being organized” and provide you with the direction you need to take that first crucial step towards achieving a sense of accomplishment. So, let's dive in and discover how to finally organize your home once and for all.

Organizing is a 2-part concept.

Organizing is not a superpower possessed only by a chosen few; it's available to all of us. The concept of “organizing” your home is often misunderstood, with many believing they should naturally have the ability to keep their home in perfect order at all times.

In reality, “organizing” is a 2-part concept: the first part is “decluttering” and the second part is “organizing”. Understanding this difference will help alleviate the pressure, allowing you to approach organizing with a fresh perspective.

·        “Decluttering” is when you make decisions on what to keep and what to let go, often creating more physical space. Once you achieve more physical space, you can organize your items in an orderly way.

·        “Organizing” is when you designate a location for your items and select the best storage solution.

It may not be a surprise to you, but when you have fewer things, it’s easier to organize them and find them again. With fewer places to search and fewer things to sift through, you save time and space. Once part 1 (decluttering) and part 2 (organizing) are complete, then you can work on subsequent elements like returning items to where they belong and cleaning, which is much easier when clutter is eliminated.

When you find decluttering a challenge, you’re not alone.

As it turns out, most of us find “decluttering” to be really challenging and it often feels insurmountable. As humans we naturally attach emotion to our objects. So, when it comes time to assess whether you want to keep or discard an item, it’s hard to do because you must overcome the emotional attachment you have to it. Marie Kondo explains that “…when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”

You’ll find decluttering success by tapping into your emotions.

Because we attach emotions to our items, we can use that aspect to help us make our decisions. Your goal is to be surrounded by only things that have positive emotions attached to them, or items that are truly needed for practical purposes.

Use your emotional attachment to help you make your decisions, with a bit of practical logic woven in. If you feel light and bright when you hold an item, keep it with confidence. If you feel any sense of guilt or excuse to keep it, that’s your sign it’s safe to let it go, unless of course it has a practical purpose. For example, you may not love your hammer, but you may love the future possibility of hanging art on your walls, so it would be good to keep.

Another common struggle to getting organized is finding the time or motivation.

If it’s possible to put something off, us humans are likely to do that. We tend to get organized when we are forced to with an upcoming move, baby on the way, retirement, and so on. But decluttering and organizing, is more of a journey rather than a destination, where you take stock of the things in your life that support you.

You can explore 20 Life-Changing Benefits of Decluttering and Organizing Your Home in this blog post if you’re looking for some motivation. With so many obvious benefits, there’s no need to wait for a life transition to declutter and organize. You can start to create your ideal lifestyle by surrounding yourself with your favourite things at any time in your life. With plenty of daily benefits to being organized, you just need to designate time to get started.

Once you’ve set some time aside, you may need direction on where to begin.

The first step to organizing your home is to tackle a space you encounter daily—and your closet is a great choice. By transforming this often-cluttered area into a calm, simplistic space, you'll not only have a beautiful closet to choose your outfits from, you’ll have a daily reminder of your accomplishments, motivating you to conquer the rest of your belongings. If you have limited time to declutter, or expect you’ll get interrupted, look at each of your clothing categories separately and tackle them in chunks, i.e. today I’ll tackle my shirts, tomorrow I’ll do my pants, etc.

Organizing is a journey, not a destination, and progress is more important than perfection.

When you begin decluttering and organizing, you’ll see that organizing isn’t about perfection but progress. When one category is decluttered and organized, you’ll find the motivation to keep going with the next category. Embrace the imperfections, continue learning about what you like, and enjoy the journey of choosing what to keep, as your preferences will likely change throughout your life.

With this refreshed perspective on what it means to get organized, go forth and organize your home once and for all! If you have any questions along the way, or need some motivation, please feel free to email or call me and we can talk through your decluttering and organizing challenges.