Find the Valuable Real Estate in Your Home
Sometimes the biggest reason that we can’t seem to stay organized is that the places we store our items are not the places that they should actually be stored.
In the beginning of this book I talked about using the acronym SPACE to properly organize your home. In the last chapter, we covered “P is for Purging,” and in this chapter, we are going to talk about the importance of implementing “A is for Assign” in order to stay organized for good.
You’re going to have to bear with me on this concept. I find it ridiculously hard to explain on paper, but I will try my absolute best not to bore the bananas out of you.
I think the best way to try and explain this is to just drop a truth bomb on you: we are all lazy. Now, I’m not talking about laziness in the laying-on-the-sofa-in-stained-sweat-pants-all-day kind of way. What I mean is, when we’re done using something and we have to walk all the way to the other side of the house to put it away, nine times out of ten, we’ll set it aside to put away later.
When it comes to assigning a proper home for our belongings, almost all of us have already started off on the wrong foot. Most of the time, we have assigned our belongings a home in this situation:
You just moved to your new place. You’re tired and overwhelmed and all you want to do is get the boxes emptied as quickly as possible. You open closets and cabinets and start unpacking everything, designating spots and putting stuff away. You may even have friends and family helping you to unpack, with little or no input on where you would like your things put. Usually, once everything has been put away, that is how it will remain…for years…whether it was the most logical or functional spot or not.
It is impossible to pick the best and most functional home for your belongings before you have even had a chance to live in and function in the space.
Just because your wine glasses are currently stored in the cupboard above your refrigerator doesn’t mean that you have to keep them there forever, especially if a glass of wine with dinner every night is the only way eating with a picky toddler is bearable.
I cannot tell you how many times I have had conversations with friends, family, and clients that go something like this:
(Random person in my life): “I need your help organizing. My house is too small and I have no place to store all of my kid’s toys.”
(Me): “Why don’t you try putting some in that closet right there in the living room beside where the kids like to play with their toys?”
(Random person in my life): “That closet is full of cleaning supplies.”
(Me): “Why don’t you relocate the cleaning supplies somewhere else?”
(Random person in my life): “Because that is where the cleaning supplies go.”
(Me): *Face Palm*
Your stuff is not super glued into place. You can move it around and you should.
Relocating your items and rearranging your belongings in order to better fit the needs of your family and your home is a critical part of the organizing process.
It is ok to move things around.
You will more than make up the time you spend moving things around with each and every extra step that you’ll save putting those things away.
So, how do you find out the best place to store all of your things? You start by first IDENTIFYING THE VALUABLE REAL ESTATE in your home.
The valuable real estate in your home are the areas that are the easiest to access. In your kitchen, the bottom shelf of your upper cabinets and the top drawers in your lower cabinets are the valuable real estate. If you are storing Christmas mugs (that are used once a year) on your lower shelf of your upper cabinets, you are wasting that valuable space.
In order to stay organized, your home has to be more than just a clean and clutter-free looking space. It needs to be functional. I’m sure you have heard this wonderful organizing mantra before: “Everything in it’s place and a place for everything.” While this is what it takes to have an organized home, it’s having a truly functional home that keeps it staying neat and organized forever.
To have a functional home, one that practically cleans itself, you need to make sure that all the items you use every day are in the easiest to access place in the most high traffic areas of your home.
Here is the issue in a nutshell: if something is hard to put away, we probably just won’t do it. We will set it aside and pile it up to be put away “later.” It isn’t just how hard something is to put away that affects the function of your home, either; it’s also how long it takes you to put those things away.
If your dishes and utensils are not in the cupboard and drawer closest to the dishwasher, then putting away the dishes is going to eat up more of your precious time than it needs to. Even if it is just walking a few extra steps every day, all of those extra steps can add up to a lot of wasted time and energy.
I know that you may be thinking, but exercise is good! Okay, fine, exercise is good, but if you could add up all of that wasted time you spend on unnecessary effort, you could have so much more real time left over each day to spend exercising in ways you actually enjoy.
The best way to really describe this concept is to give you some examples.
When we moved into our current home I was over-the-moon excited to have a ginormous playroom for my kids. I filled it with all of their toys and games and I created an awesome art station for them—complete with an easel and everything they could ever want to get their “art” on.
The playroom seemed like the logical place to store all of their art supplies, but for some reason, our kitchen counter was always filled with piles of coloring books and crayons. Every day I would pile up their art supplies and eventually carry them back to the playroom, but the next day, the kids would carry everything back up so they could color in the kitchen again.
For our home, my kids designated the kitchen as the spot where they liked doing arts and crafts. As much as I loathed those piles of art supplies on my kitchen counter every day, no matter how many times I cleaned it up, the piles would just end up right back there again before I knew it.
If I described my ideal vision for how my kitchen would function, a coloring spot would not be on the list. Sometimes, though, your home and your family just have their own unique way of functioning, whether you like it or not. Instead of fighting the piles of art supplies, I worked with that clutter to create a home for it right where it was used the most. I cleaned out a few drawers in my kitchen that were storing aprons, place mats, and other stuff that was hardly used, and I relocated those things to a hall closet. Now we have three art and homework drawers right in our kitchen island, and those piles of clutter are a thing of the past.
Take a look at your “piles” around your home. Odds are, they are piled where they are because you or your family members are “waiting” to put the things away until “later.” If you have to wait until later to put those things away, that usually means that the home for those things is not as convenient as it could be.
One of my very first clients struggled with paper clutter, and hired me to help them design a system that would finally free them of the piles of paper on their kitchen counter.
Because it was one of my first times ever organizing someone else’s home, I made the mistake of listening to what the clients thought they wanted, instead of listening to what their home was telling me. This busy family had two full-time working parents and two adorable young children. Their two-story home was tidy and beautifully decorated, but the small kitchen had limited workspace and most of it was buried under mounds of mail, notes, and school papers.
I suggested we create a Kitchen Command Center to organize all of their paper, but they were adamant that they wanted the system to be in their home office, which was located on the second floor. Sometimes, what we think is the ideal function for our home isn’t necessarily the best option. I spent six hours creating a beautiful filing system in their home office for all of their paperwork, complete with custom labels and hanging baskets for each of their children’s school papers on the wall. My clients were thrilled and they assumed that their paper clutter was a thing of the past.
It wasn’t even two weeks later when I received a call from them. Their kitchen counters were full of papers again, and they wanted me to come back and help them design a different system. This time, I had to get real with them.
I asked the parents to describe their daily routine when they came home from work every day. After work, the mom would pick up their children from daycare and grab the mail as she came in the front door. She would set the mail down on the kitchen island (which was just feet from the entrance) and help the kids unpack their backpacks (again, in the kitchen). The kids would have a snack and work on their homework at the kitchen table while she started dinner. About twenty minutes later, the dad would return home from work and drop his computer and files on the counter and start helping with dinner.
Their evenings were a blur of after-school activities and bedtime routines, and before they knew it, the parents were waking up the next morning to a kitchen counter full of paper again.
So why wasn’t their home office paper system working? Because it wasn’t a convenient spot; no one is going to take time out of his or her hectic schedule to put away papers all the way up the freaking stairs every night. The office wasn’t the natural place that they stored or used those papers, the kitchen was. Therefore, the kitchen was the best spot to assign a paper organizing system.
The mom was not happy with this idea at all. She was convinced that, in no way, did she have space in their kitchen for anything else. She was also a Ladybug, so she hated the idea of seeing her paper filing system out in the open every day. I offered to set up a kitchen system that she could try for two weeks, and if she still didn’t like it, I would come back and relocate and reorganize everything for free.
After peaking and snooping inside the cabinets, I found a bread maker, rice cooker, stand up mixer and a blender that were covered in dust and were obviously not being used. In such a small kitchen, storing unused items was a huge space waster. We moved these items to the basement, moved some things around, and freed up a large upper cabinet right above the island. I moved their mail sorting system into the cabinet and hung cork boards on the inside of the cabinet doors for messages and important papers. I moved the school paper baskets from the office and hung them in the kitchen instead, with a dry erase calendar mounted above.
My clients were less than impressed; this wasn’t the system they had envisioned for their home at all. If Yelp was around back then, I would have been given a bad review for sure.
It was just a week later when the mom called me to let me know that their paper clutter was finally gone and that she loved the system now that they had been using it for awhile. I didn’t slap her with a giant “I told you so,” but the experience did help me become a much better organizer.
It’s important to understand the flow of your home. It’s also important to understand that sometimes creating “lazy organizing systems” isn’t a bad thing. Life is hard enough; you don’t get extra bonus points for making things more difficult than they need to be.
Let’s adapt the motto, Work Smarter, Not Harder, when it comes to organizing our homes!
If you’re always reading books in the living room, put a basket beside your reading chair to store some of your favorite books. If your kids never put their shoes away in the front hall closet, put a basket at the front door just for them! Do you always toss your gently worn jeans and sweaters on top of your dresser? Just install some hooks behind your bedroom door for all of those dirty-but-not-dirty-enough-to-wash-yet clothes.
Your kitchen is by far the most valuable real estate in your entire home, and everything you store in there should be used often. The items you use every day should be in the easiest to access areas of your kitchen; store things where you use them the most, like pots and pans beside the stove and drinking glasses beside the sink. There is no reason why you can’t store occasional kitchen items, like big soup pots or roasting pans, in some other storage area of your home in order to free up space for items you use often, like the toaster.
A few years ago, I was visiting my in-laws’ home, and I felt the urge to organize. Their house is always really clean and gorgeous, but they store their stuff in the weirdest possible places. My mother-in-law is short, like five-foot-nothing on her tippy toes kind of short. She has exactly two shelves in her upper cabinets she can reach without a stool…two. One of these shelves was dedicated to drinking glasses and mugs, which makes sense, but the other one was used for her spices.
This may seem like a reasonable spot for spices, except my mother-in-law never uses spices when cooking, like ever. So, in her kitchen, where she can only reach two areas of upper cabinets, she uses one of those areas to store something she never uses.
I relocated the spices and was trying to decide what to put in this newly empty shelf, the most valuable real estate in her kitchen. She uses plates and bowls daily, but they were kept in the pantry (don’t get me started) and it worked for them, so I left those there. When I asked her what else she uses every single day, she said that both her and my father-in-law drink coffee and tea multiple times a day. This empty shelf was the perfect spot to store their coffee, K-Cups, and tea, because it was directly above her Keurig, kettle, and coffee maker!
“Where is your coffee now?” I asked. Her response: “In the bathroom closet.” I kid you not. I almost peed myself laughing. I would never have laughed at a client, but my in-laws and I have a great relationship… they laugh at me all the time!
Because the kitchen was filled the day they moved in and they had extra space in their bathroom closet, it seemed completely normal to walk back and forth across the house multiple times a day, each time they wanted a hot beverage…all the while storing things they never, ever used right above the coffee maker. You may be shaking your head, thinking that is crazy, but I can promise you, there are spots in your own home where you are doing the exact same thing.
Let’s look at some easy techniques to help you find your valuable real estate and assign proper homes for your things.
Listen to your home’s clutter - Take a look at your piles to get a really good idea of what items in your space are currently hard to put away. Even if the home for those items is in the same room and close by, it may still not be a convenient enough spot to use regularly. I see this a lot with teenagers. “Why won’t he put his dirty clothes in the basket? Why does he just throw them on the floor?” Try moving the basket out of his closet and beside where he usually tosses his dirty clothes. Voila, the basket will get used and the floor will be clean! Lazy? Yes, but sometimes working with your laziest traits can create the most functional and effective solutions.
Get in the zone - Almost every room can be broken into different zones based on different activities and functions each room has. Perhaps your living room is used for watching television, a kid play area, and a place where you do your crafts. Set up zones in your living room that store all of the things you need for those different activities. Have one section dedicated to toy storage, another just for watching television, and use a rolling storage unit to house all of the craft supplies you are using for your current project.
Work Smarter, Not Harder - When trying to make your home as functional as possible, you have to listen to your inner lazy child! Try to set up your space so that you have to do as little work as possible to maintain it. I do a lot of little DIY projects all the time, and I’m constantly dragging tools back and forth from the garage. One day I had a lazy light bulb moment: why not store all my most-used tools in a tool box in the hall closet beside my kitchen? My kitchen counter is where I usually fix little broken things, replace batteries, and do small DIY projects. It made perfect sense to keep my tools close by. I no longer have piles of tools on my kitchen counter that need to be carried out to the garage.
Do the Tango - Reassigning a lot of your belongings will be work, I can’t lie about that. Once you move your plates to the cabinet above the dishwasher, you’ll need to reassign the stuff that was already in that cabinet to a more logical spot, and so on and so forth. You can easily dance your stuff all around the house finding the most functional homes, and sometimes that tango can seem to be a never-ending song. Let me assure you, rearranging your things in order to make them easier to put away is worth every single second you spend doing it. Not only will you always find unwanted items you can toss or donate along the way, but you will also be left with a clean and functional space that will be effortless to keep that way.
Remember, don’t be afraid to dance those rarely used items you still want to keep into the garage or other storage area in order to free up valuable real estate for the things you use all the time.
Hopefully I have made this “A is for Assign” concept easy to understand. By setting up systems that allow you to be a little lazier, you’re going to save time and effort and be able to enjoy a clutter-free home for life. Start reassigning today!
