Is it in the right place?
Everyone is familiar with the phrase ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ - this is definitely one of the first steps to getting, and more importantly keeping organised in your home. Making sure you have a home for everything you own means you know where to find it and where to put it once you have finished with it.
My job involves making sure things are not just in a place, but in the right place. This is the ultimate goal in making your home work for you; it really is the key to making sure everything gets returned. To do it you have to be able to look at how everyone uses a space. Some rules can generally apply to all homes (e.g. in the kitchen – glasses near the tap, mugs near the kettle etc) but a lot of it really depends on the family and how they use it.
It is easy to see this in the recent kitchen organisation I complete for Tam’s Cakes and Cookies – a kitchen that not only needed to function for family life, but also for her cake making business. It was important to have Tam present for the process so I could talk to her about what she does where; which things she used more than others and how frequently. This meant I could prioritise the areas in her kitchen making sure so she has what she needs at her fingers tips when she is cooking.
So how do you go about it?
To give you perspective, you really need a friend to help you, otherwise you will get caught up in the way things are already - so find a friend who can help.
✔ Choose one room to focus on.
✔ Open all the cupboards and drawers
✔ Walk around the room and talk about how you use the room – who uses it, what for.
✔ Look at what works, and what is causing you problems
✔ With your friend explore ways that you can take what happens already and make that part of the routine and home for those items.
For example:
The children come home from school, dump their bags on the floor and then do their homework on the kitchen table. Their bags are always in the middle of the floor and moan they can never find their books or a pen.
What could you do?
✔ Find a cupboard near the kitchen table where the children can ‘put’ their bags. If there isn’t one, find room to put a box on the floor or under the table where they can put their bags.
✔ Get a magazine holder or folder for them to keep a pen and their books / homework in and locate it near the kitchen table, ideally in the same cupboard or box that their bags will be in. This will mean they can pick it up as soon as the dump their bags – and the world is a happier place.
By looking at what happens and trying to make the ‘place’ for something to belong similar to where it already is makes it much easy for everyone to adopt it. It is more natural, there is less to think about and there is far more likelihood that things will be returned to their ‘natural’ home.
If you would like some help on how to tackle your home, The Plan maybe the perfect thing for you, For £120 I will visit your home and talk to you about how it functions and then produce a plan on what needs to be done to move things to a place that will work for you. You can find out more details here The Plan.
