12 May 30 Genius Ways to Organize Your Home and Declutter!
30 Genius Ways to Organize Your Home and Declutter!
As of today, half of humanity is currently under orders to stay home by their governments. 2020 is turning out to be quite a year, Covid-19 is making sure of that. In Malaysia, the most recent extension keeps Malaysians at home until the end of April. If you haven’t already cleaned out your homes 10 times and found a way to organize everything in your living space, we’re telling you: now’s the time!
What you have to understand is that to organize is more than just to clean! An organized home is clean, for sure. But a clean home isn’t necessarily organized. To organize your home is to declutter, minimalize and ensure your space is efficiently used, that there isn’t too much stuff, or too little.
Reorganizing your home can make you feel much better about your living situation, you can take stock of what you have. You can eliminate what you don’t need, and do the spring cleaning and life administration that leads to a leaner, cleaner life! Read on!
Fella Design presents 30 genius ways to organize your home and declutter! We’ll take you room by room of your house, from the living room to the bedroom. Furniture tips and tricks to help you live a more organized life!
General
These first few suggestions are for organizing your home in general! Whether it’s making use of wall space or other organizing tips and tricks, they aren’t focused on a particular room! The tips here can be generalized to your entire home:
1. Floating Shelf Storage
A lot of the time, the walls of our home are pretty bare, if not completely bare. Even if they aren’t, we put up paintings or photographs or mirrors, or other aesthetic pieces in an attempt to furnish it and make it look less empty. When planning a home, interior designers seldom make as much use of wall space as they can. Only when living in a home for a while do you understand the functionality of the space, where best to put up floating shelves. In any case, floating shelf storage saves space, and looks great at the same time.
2. Drawer Dividers
The simplest way of organizing drawers: get dividers. Dumping all your stuff in a drawer creates a mess. Sure, you might organize items by drawer, but when you need something in particular, you have to rummage drawers to find it. You don’t want to do that. Dividers allow you to organize your things within the drawer itself. They are cheap, they look great, and they represent a great first step to organizing your home! What’s stopping you from getting them!
3. Hit Up the Dollar Store
One of the first things you can do before you organize your home is hit up the dollar store! Malaysia has a ton of Daisos, Yubisos and RM2 stores where you can buy plenty of drawer dividers, storage containers, and such for extremely cheap prices. Purchases such as this can kick start your great home organizing plan! These stores also sell key organizers, cheap racks, adhesive hooks and all sorts of knick knacks that can make your organizing easier and more streamlined! Hit up one of these dollar stores and see for yourself! Alternatively, do some e-shopping! Head on over to Lazada or Shopee and get a whole bunch of storage containers!
4. Don’t Hoard – Purge!
As you begin organizing your home, you’ll be faced with one decision time and time again: do I throw this away, or do I keep it? Here’s a simple rule of thumb to help you navigate that question: If you can’t remember when the last time was you used the thing, throw it out! Don’t hoard! Purge! Throwing things is always better than keeping them unless they are absolutely essential to you. It might be difficult in the beginning, and you might even feel that you’ve regretted your decision right after you’ve done it, but in time, you’ll forget about it completely and find it’s not so bad afterall.
5. Less is More
In more ways than one, less is more. Minimalistic living is not only practical and functional, but also beautiful and stylish. Modern design styles all incorporate some form of minimalism or another. Remember that as you approach organizing your home. One good tip is to cut down the variety of anything. Keep a lean range of cleaning products, toiletries, linens, clothes, anything! You’ll be better off for it. You’ll have a clearer head, and a more organized home!
6. Label, Label, Label
We can’t stress this enough! As you begin organizing your various belongings into containers and throwing out stuff, we have to remind you: label, label, label! If you don’t, you’ll realize your belongings quickly becoming a mess again. Labeling helps you compartmentalize and organize your belongings. This streamlines things, and helps you see clearly what can be thrown away, and what to keep. You might also begin to realize what an amount of junk you hoard without actually knowing it. Once the labels are in place, you’ll not only have a much more organized home, you’ll have an organized mind too! From this state of mind, you can begin living a more peaceful, ordered life.
7. Train Yourself to Put Things Back In Their Spot
Regrettably, if you’re a parent, this is going to sound like yourself lecturing your kids to put things back where they belong, but… put things back where they belong! Sometimes we forget that not only toys should be put back in their place. Everything should be put back where they belong, and too often they are not. If you’ve gone to the dollar shop, if you’ve managed to get yourself tons of containers, and if you’ve managed to label them, the next thing you need to do is acquire a new habit. Train yourself to put things back in their place! Once you have this habit things automatically become more organized in your home, without things piling up.
8. Trash Can in Every Room
A trash can in every room actually helps with decluttering more than you think. We actually keep a lot of things that are trash in our homes. Why do we actually keep them? There are lots of reasons we keep things that are really trash, most of them emotional. But there are plenty of practical reasons as well, one of them is not having somewhere convenient to throw it away. We just “put things down for a moment”, and they end up lasting MONTHS without getting thrown away! A trash can in every room helps remind us that it’s okay to throw things away, and makes it convenient to do so!
9. Hang Up and Label Your Keys
Keys are one of those things that can get muddled and confusing very quickly, especially if you have a big home, with many rooms, and therefore many doors. Keys also all tend to look the same after a while, so labeling them with interesting labels sold at dollar stores or online is an excellent way of organizing them! Hanging them up on hooks against a wall also helps keep them handy! It’ll go a long way to helping you find the right keys in a fraction of the time.
10. Eliminate “Catch-All”, “Junk” or “Clutter” Spaces
Many of us have catch-all spaces at home. It probably started out as a guest room, or what most Malaysians would call a store room. But over time, it became a dumping ground for everything that we have no idea where else to put. These un-used spaces become a catch-all, a junk room, a place to store everything that doesn’t go anywhere else, and we keep the door of this room firmly shut to our guests. Here’s our suggestion: eliminate these spaces, purge the stuff you have been hoarding in them, repurpose this space to something more useful! Decorate it! Make it a drawing room! A day room! A little tea room to host small groups of guests! Don’t leave it in the state that it’s in.
11. Install Bright Lighting
One reason why homes can seem so dreary, dark and disorganized is the lack of natural lighting at home. If you’re undergoing a renovation while simultaneously organizing your home, a good idea would be to install bigger windows to invite more light into your home. Installing bright lighting also helps create an open, wider, airy space, which adds to a cleaner more organized home.
Study
These next suggestions are for your study room, a room which is often cluttered with paperwork, stationary, official documents and all sorts of other knick-knacks. This leads to some pretty disorganized study rooms if you aren’t careful. Follow our suggestions and get your study organized!
12. Multi-functional Study Desk
Your study desks shouldn’t only be a desk. It should be a proper study desk, with various compartments and shelves to organize your material. Get a multi-functional study desk as your primary piece of furniture in your study room! It should be the centre of the room, and it will streamline how you organize your paperwork, documents and stationary! Check out Fella Design’s range of study tables for some interesting options!
13. Cable Management
Cables can be nightmarish. Especially if you have a desktop filled with snaking cables behind your desk that’s creating a complete tangle of snarling wires. Simple cable management tools that can be bought from Shopee, Lazada, or even Daiso or the dollar shops can go miles in organizing these cables! No more trying to untangle that mess!
14. Go Digital
Everything nowadays is on the cloud. Everyone uses a computer to work nowadays, and gone were the days of paperwork and pen. You’d go a long way to organizing your home and your belongings if you’d go digital not only at work, but at home too. Start by digitizing your photo albums! Material goods have a certain romanticism about them, but they are vulnerable to the elements. Digitize your photos and upload them into the cloud to ensure they are forever safe! Toss out non-essential albums and keep non-essential photos organized in the cloud instead. You can digitize books now, and donate your physical hardbacks to those who need them, and who can’t afford digital books. Throw out CDs and DVDs! Cookbooks that you haven’t touched in some time! Learn how to use Spotify and one of the hundreds of cooking recipe websites instead! Go digital and have a more organized home!
15. Set Up An Outbox
You know the outbox of your e-mail and it’s function? You can have a physical outbox on your study desk too, to streamline and organize your paperwork. An outbox on your desk would be for outgoing items and documents, meant for leaving your study table. Having one would mean that you have these items in your hand at the instant you need it, without having to search for it through piles of paperwork. Setting one up against a wall can not only be functional and efficient, but beautiful too!
16. Create a Mail Station
Similar to an outbox in your study, we also need a way to organize all our incoming and outgoing physical mail. Oftentimes, it’s easier to organize our e-mail inboxes than our physical mail. Frequently, especially when it comes to bills and statements, our physical mailbox can get overwhelmed and swamped. Set aside a mail station on a functional console table near the entrance of your home, or in your study. This will help you streamline and organize mail, and prevent it from becoming a mess as it so often does!
Living Room
There are many ways to reduce clutter in the living room. The living room is a place where we host guests, friends and family, and we need it to be clean and organized at all times. Follow the next few tips, think of investing in interesting storage furniture, and organizing your living room will be no problem at all!
17. Lift Top Coffee Tables
Lift top coffee tables has to be one of the prime examples of form and function when it comes to living room furniture. Most coffee tables don’t rise very high above the ground. Usually, they are low so they don’t block line of sight from the sofa sets to the television. This also allows drinks and food to be placed on the coffee table at a height comfortable for seated guests. However, the height of a regular coffee table gets in the way of, for example, working on a laptop, or eating a proper meal. This is because a coffee table is too low for such activities. This problem is completely eliminated by lift top coffee tables! Moving on smooth-glide hydraulics, the top of the coffee table can be modified to fit the regular functions of a coffee table, but also lift up to suit acitvities like eating and working!
Most lift top coffee tables also come with interesting storage spaces, allowing you to declutter your living room and the regular chaff on top of coffee tables. Check out Fella Design lift top coffee tables right now!
18. Storage Corner Sets
Since we’re on the subject of functional furniture, one worth mentioning are storage corner sofas. Corner sofas are elegant pieces of furniture, able to fill up the corner of a living room perfectly. However, standard corner sets are often more beautiful with cushions and throws. These cushions and throws need linens, washing, replacements. You can see how quickly these can stack up and lead to clutter, if not in your living room, then in other parts of the home! Storage corner sets, like the one pictured above, can be a great place to store throw cushions and throws! It can be a good place to start when seeking for a more organized home and living room!
19. Storage Ottomans
Just like storage corner sets, corner ottomans can also serve that same purpose. Functioning both as a footrest, extra seating for guests, and a storage location to boot! Throw in extra cushions, throws and linen replacements and declutter your living room! The same functions can be realized with footstools and benches too! Check out Fella Design’s range of footstools, benches and ottomans for more!
20. Keep a Tray On Your Coffee Table
Another way to reorganize your living room is to invest in a coffee table tray! You can place your various TV remotes, coffee table magazines and the like on it to streamline the mess in your living room! This simple and affordable change can go a long way to declutter!
21. Prioritize Flow in Your Furniture
Sometimes, the way furniture is arranged in a living room can tremendously affect the perception whether it’s cluttered or open and airy. This reminds one of the oriental practice of feng shui, but it is simply a practice of finding the best, most functional, and most beautiful way to organize your furniture. If furniture is arranged in the wrong way, it can actually affect the flow of traffic, and render the space awkward, confined and cluttered. By emphasizing flow when arranging your furniture, you’ll conform to the natural contours of the living room, resulting in a more open, airy and intelligent living space!
Kitchen
Easily one of the most cluttered and least organize rooms in the home, if unobserved, the organisation of your kitchen can quickly deteriorate. Follow our tips and tricks and you’ll have a neater, cleaner kitchen in no time!
22. Hang Up Your Pots and Pans
Too often, we allow an entire cabinet space to get clogged up with stacked pots and pans that are a bother to store and retrieve. Use the bare walls of your kitchen! Install a hanging rack, or even a shelf if that’s what you want to go for! Make use of the vertical space as a way to store those chunky pots and pans! Besides, once you mange to hang them all up, they might actually make your kitchen look more homely, and you’ll have no more problems getting things organized!
23. Create a Spice Cabinets
Visit the dollar stores like we suggested earlier in this article, and you can buy a battery of mason jars or other kinds of containers! Using this, you can install an affordable wall rack in your kitchen to create a spice cabinet! Labelling the mason jars would get you one step further! Together, the labelling, the identical containers and a wall rack would make not only a functional spice rack, but a beautiful one too!
24. Streamline Your Fridge!
Doesn’t that look lovely! We often don’t approach this level of organisation when it comes to our fridges, but why not! It looks so beautiful, and it’s functional too. Besides, depending on how you store your food, you can either lengthen or shorten the amount of time you can store them fresh. Wash fruits and vegetables and store them in clean plastic containers or cling wrap. Never leave items in the packaging you bought them in from the grocery store. Always remove them, clean them, and place them in your own storage! You can even go further and think about labelling everything! Never forget what you have in your fridge again!
25. Repurpose Trays and Bowls as Organizers
Have you got old trays and bowls in your kitchen that you don’t really use anymore? Do you know how to tell? If you don’t remember the last time you used something, it’s time to repurpose it! As shown in the photo above, trays and bowls that are no longer used in your kitchen can still be used as containers and organizers! Repurpose them and watch your old dishware get a new lease of life in your more organized home!
26. Label Expiry Dates
After doing your groceries, it doesn’t take much effort to ensure they are packed away in your fridge and pantry neatly. One thing that always goes awry in managing your food stocks are expiry dates. For some reason, it always seems that expired food clutters up our storage spaces and kitchens. Here’s a tip, after groceries, as you’re packing your groceries away one by one, label them with the expiry date you see on them with a big sign! It’s a sure-fire, fool-proof way to keep your food stores lean!
Dining Room, Bedroom & Toilets
Lastly, we have a few tips for the other rooms of your house! The dining room, where your dining table should be clutter free and ready to use all of the time! The bedroom, where most of our mess piles up, and toilets!
27. Extendable Dining Table
Extendable dining tables, the kind that can reduce from an 8-seater to a 6-seater and vice versa, are becoming more and more fashionable in modern dining rooms. They are elegant, and brilliant combination of form and function. Only whip out the 8-seater extension if you’re expecting guests! Otherwise, keep it lean and tidy at 6 seats! This way, you get to reduce clutter in your dining room when needed, keeping things large an airy without sacrificing seating space. Check out Fella Design’s range of dining tables!
28. Organize Jewelry
Like cables, jewelry can get into a snarling tangle very quickly, and so, they deserve some special attention too! Wherever you store your jewelry, whether in the bathroom or the bedroom, it’s a good idea to dedicate some wall space and hang them up! Get a pegboard, or a pretty driftwood hook rack, or any other kind of aesthetic, functional wall decor to get them up there. No more frustrating tangles! Everything is organized, untangled, and exactly where they need to be for quick retrieval!
29. Storage Beds
In the same spirit as storage corner sets and storage ottomans, there are also storage beds! Why not make intelligent use of the space under your bed? Get a bed with storage drawers, or intelligently designed storage closets installed to put away fresh linens or other clutter that you don’t want to be clogging up your bedroom! Storage beds can look really classy too!
30. Over the Toilet Storage
Very often, the space above our toilet bowls are seldom used. Over the toilet storage can be an intelligent way to save space, and also an opportunity to give your toilet some character! For example, this rustic over the toilet storage rack is excellent for organizing linens. It looks great too!
With these 30 tips to help you, we’re sure that, should you want to embark on an journey to declutter and organize your home during the movement control order, you have a place to start! Want to read more quality quarantine content? Check out these 7 furniture you wish you had now that you’re self-isolating, our suggestions for 5 things you can do at home, and 5 workouts you can do from your sofa!