Anyone can benefit from a more organized home. Whether you have a busy household or simply want to make your space easier to manage, the hardest part can be figuring out where to start and how to keep it organized.
Being organized can make everyday life easier. You can spend less time looking for things, make it easier to put things away, keep clutter from building up, and create a home that works better for you and your family.
As professional home organizers in Baton Rouge, we help individuals and families declutter and organize their homes every day.
10 Tips to Help Keep Your Home Organized
We’ve put together 10 of our favorite organizing tips to help you get your home organized and make it easier to maintain.
1. The Less You Have, the Easier It Is to Stay Organized
One of the simplest ways to make your home easier to organize is to have less stuff in it. The more you own, the more space you have to find, put away, clean around, and keep organized.
That doesn’t mean you need to get rid of everything. But regularly letting go of things you no longer use, need, or want can make your home much easier to manage.
In our experience as professional organizers, this is probably the most important tip on this list because it can have an effect on almost every area of your home.
The less you have, the less you have to organize, put away, clean around, and find space for. It also makes it much easier to refresh your space when things get messy because there’s simply less to deal with.
2. Declutter Before You Organize
Before you start reorganizing a closet, pantry, kitchen, garage, office, laundry room, or another area of your home, go through what you have first.
Figure out what you’re keeping, what can be donated, and what needs to be thrown away. If you skip this step, you may end up just moving things around and trying to find space for items you no longer want or need.
Decluttering first helps free up space and makes it easier to see what you actually have. Once you know what you’re keeping, you’ll have a much better idea of how much you need to organize and how much space you have to work with.
3. Declutter Regularly
Decluttering doesn’t have to be something you do once every few years when things have gotten completely overwhelming.
Regularly go through different areas of your home and look for things you no longer use, need, or want. This could be clothes that no longer fit, expired pantry items, toys your kids have outgrown, or things you’ve simply stopped using.
The less unnecessary stuff you have in your home, the easier it is to manage, clean, and organize your space. Regular decluttering can also help you see what you already have, which may prevent you from buying duplicates because you couldn’t find something you already owned.
How often you declutter will be different for everyone. You might go through certain areas once a week, once a month, or every few months depending on your schedule and how quickly things accumulate.
The important thing is to do it regularly. Even getting a few things out at a time can help prevent clutter from building up and make your home easier to maintain.
4. Regularly Refresh Your Space
Even a well-organized home needs regular refreshing. By refreshing your space, we simply mean taking some time to straighten up, put things back where they belong, and reorganize areas that are starting to get messy.
The more often you do this, the easier your home can be to maintain. When a space goes too long without being straightened up, things start getting put in the wrong places, piles form, and clutter can gradually build up.
It may seem like more work to spend a little time refreshing your home every week or every few weeks, but it can actually save you time in the long run. Straightening up a little at a time is usually much easier than waiting several months and then having an entire room or area to tackle.
You don’t have to completely reorganize your home every time. Even a quick reset can help keep your space from becoming harder to manage over time.
5. Try to Get Things Out Before Bringing More In
We’re constantly bringing new things into our homes. Clothes, packages, groceries, gifts, toys, household supplies, and apparently whatever else Target convinced us was essential that afternoon.
Before bringing something new home, consider whether you already have something similar and where the new item will go.
You don’t have to follow a strict one-in, one-out rule, but regularly getting things out as new things come in can help keep your belongings from taking over your available space.
6. Declutter Before Buying Organizing Products
Don’t start an organizing project by buying a bunch of bins, baskets, and containers.
Declutter first. Once you know what you’re keeping, you’ll have a much better idea of what actually needs to be contained, how many organizing products you need, where they’ll be stored, and how much space you have to work with.
You may also find that you don’t need to buy anything at all. As you declutter different areas of your home, bins and containers you already own may become empty and can be reused somewhere else.
Buying organizing products too early can sometimes create more clutter instead of solving it. If the products don’t fit your space or you end up not needing them, you’re left with things to return or extra bins and containers that now need somewhere to be stored.
Declutter first, see what you’re left with, and then decide whether an organizing product would actually make the space work better.
7. Lightly Clean the Space Before You Organize It
Once you’ve taken everything out of a space, take a few minutes to lightly clean it before putting everything back.
It doesn’t need to be a deep clean. Wipe out bathroom or kitchen cabinets and drawers to remove dust, crumbs, hair, or anything else that has collected over time. If you’re organizing a closet, wipe down the shelves or vacuum the floor. If you’re working in an attic or garage, sweep the area before putting everything back.
This is one of the easiest times to clean these areas because they’re already empty. Once you’re finished, you can put everything back in an organized way without placing your belongings on top of dirt or dust.
Even a little cleaning can make the finished space look and feel much better. You’re not just organizing what you have. You’re giving the space a fresh start.
8. Create Organizing Systems That Work for Your Household
A good organizing system doesn’t just look nice. It needs to be something you and your family can realistically maintain.
Think about your daily routines, who uses the space, and what will make it easiest for everyone to find what they need and put things away.
For example, if you or someone in your family tends to be “out of sight, out of mind,” has ADHD, or simply prefers to see what you have, clear bins and labels may work better than containers you can’t see inside. There’s no reason to hide everything in matching baskets if it means digging through them every time you need something.
When creating a system, think about what’s easiest for you to maintain. A simple system that fits your habits and routines is much more useful than one that looks perfect but is hard to keep up with.
9. Organize Your Space Based on How You Use It
Think about what you reach for most often when deciding where things should go.
Items you use every day should generally be easy to see and access. Things you only use occasionally can usually be stored higher up, farther back, or in less convenient storage areas.
It’s also important to think about function rather than just how a space looks. Something might look great stored in a certain spot, but if it makes the item harder to access or put away, that system probably isn’t going to work for you long term.
Your home should be organized around how you actually live in it. The goal isn’t to make every space look perfect. It’s to create a setup that makes sense for you, your family, and how you use the space every day.
10. Use Organizing Products Only When You Need Them
Organizing products can be helpful, but more containers don’t automatically make a space more organized.
Sometimes bins, baskets, and containers can actually take up valuable space and make an area feel smaller, especially if they aren’t the right size or you don’t really need them. Adding products just because they look nice can also make a system more complicated than it needs to be.
Organizing products should make it easier to find, access, and put away your belongings. If you have to dig through multiple bins or move containers around just to get to something you need, the product may be hurting more than helping.
Before adding something, ask yourself what problem it’s actually solving. If your space works well without another bin, basket, or container, you probably don’t need one.
Sometimes the simplest organizing system is the one that works best.
Your Home Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect
An organized home doesn’t have to look perfect all the time. In fact, no one’s home will stay perfectly organized.
We live in our homes. We take things out, use them, move things around, get busy, and sometimes don’t put everything back right away. Even after a professional organizer organizes a space, it will get messy from time to time. That’s completely normal.
The goal is to create systems that make it easier to use your home and get things back in order when they do get messy.
Remember that organizing takes time, especially if you’re working through your entire home. You don’t have to tackle every room at once or expect everything to look exactly how you want it to right away.
Give yourself time, work through your home at a pace that makes sense for you, and focus on making your space easier to live in and maintain, not perfect.
Ready to Get Your Baton Rouge Home Organized?
We hope these tips make it a little easier to declutter, stay organized, and maintain a home that works well for you and your family.
If you’re looking for some extra help, our professional organizers in Baton Rouge work with families, individuals, business owners, seniors, and more through our home decluttering and organizing services.
We can help with every area of the home, and if you’re moving or have recently moved, we also provide packing and unpacking services.
Our goal is to make your daily life a little easier and create an organized home that’s realistic for you to maintain.
We serve Baton Rouge and surrounding areas, including Prairieville, Zachary, Gonzales, St. Gabriel, Denham Springs, Walker, Brusly, Baker, and more.
Getting started is simple. Fill out our online contact form or call us at (225) 963-6775.