A clutter-free home is not always an organised home

It’s much easier to have an organised home and life when it’s clutter-free, and you only keep what you need and love. But decluttering is just the first step in creating an organised home.

The second step is finding the right places for your things to belong. When your items have a dedicated ‘home’, it’s easy to find and tidy them away.

There are several factors to consider when thinking about the right home for your things:

The right place is the place that makes sense, where you need your item to be, to be as productive as possible. An example is that you would want your coffee cups and coffee/tea near your kettle. You will expend the least effort when making your cup of tea because everything is close at hand.

You do have to be careful with this approach, though, as if one place makes sense for a whole host of different categories of things, you may end up with a big jumble of things. Adding structure that delineates the spaces for the various sorts of things is helpful, or you may need to compromise and find a further away place for some of the categories.

Having one spot for each category rather than having a category spread out across various places in your home makes life so much easier.

This recent two day job in Balmain was a classic example of a home with no clutter in need of some organising. Having moved into a newly renovated house, there had been little time to work out how best to organise it with both Mum and Dad working full time.

The main focus areas were the kitchen and pantry, which I transformed with new containers and labels. I also reorganised the kitchen cupboards and drawers to make better use of the space.

Three wardrobes were emptied and reorganised so that every family member had their own designated space. Shelves and drawers were organised so that it was easier to see and access all of the clothes.

If you are a busy family it can be difficult to find the time to do this, but the impact can be so significant, changing the way you feel about your place, enabling you to relax and helping you to stay organised with maintainable structure.