Organizing Tips to Love Your Home
Photo from PotteryBarn.com
Day 12
Family rooms are notoriously full of more activities than just watching TV. Now video games, eating, children’s arts and crafts, infant changing stations, homework, sleepovers, computers, businesses and entertaining all happen in your family room. With a lot of homes now forgoing the formal living rooms, we want our family rooms not only to house all these activities, but still function and look good! Organization is the only way to keep the room functioning, stylish and not look like Target exploded their toy and gaming section in it!
First things first. Let’s get cleaning. You didn’t think you could get away without cleaning now, did you? Gather all items that are questionable and separate them into large boxes or tubs. One for “belongs in another room”, “questionable”, “donate/give away”, and ”stays”. Grab a trash bag and get going. Clean finger prints off the light switches, door frames and walls. Gt the baseboards dusted and looking new again. Vacuum the upholstered furniture and the drapes. Be sure to get under the furniture, where the dust bunnies love to mulitply! Just think your spring cleaning will be done ahead of time.
One of the best ways to really organize a space is to start with a clean slate. When we have lived with a space and the way it is set up for a long time, it is hard to see the room any way other than the way it was. When we try and organize under this situtation, we tend to organize by shuffling things around. We want to love our homes and the only way to love the space is when it is functioning well. You can have the most expensively decorated space, but if it doesn’t function well, we might as well have picked up furniture in an alley (don’t get me wrong – there is nothing wrong with a good dumpster dive for an amazingly functional piece!)
Once you have mapped out where activities will take place, it is time to put things back. Furniture can make or break the organizing flow in this room. If you are in the market for new furniture look for a few features that will help keep this room neat and functional! Look for coffee tables that also act as storage, good shelving utilizing vertical space (think up!), and good functioning cabinets. One thing we have to remember in all our spaces is that if it is difficult to use, we won’t put things back. We will get things out of hard to use pieces, but we won’t put them back!
I recommend not storing items in a hard to get to space. Items like trunks as coffee tables are great, but not if you have to remove all the items off the top to get inside. What a chore! This could be used for rarely used items, but not daily! When storing items, think about daily use vs. occasional use. Things we use daily should be easy to get to and easy to put away. Occasional use can be stored further away or up high. Use your prime real estate for what you need all the time!
Flat surfaces are a magnet to clutter. When we decorate a space, we tend to not want it to be messy, so we keep it clean. Take ideas from magazines and catalogues to get decorating ideas. Hit up Target, Home Goods and other discount stores to copy the look for less. Remember, if we love it we will want to keep it up!
How do you keep up your family room? What do seems to be the biggest cluttered space? What is your vision for your family room? Let us know!
About Gail Gray
