Posts Tagged ‘bedroom’

Spring Clean a Messy Drawer

Sunday, April 24th, 2022

spring-clean-a-messy-drawer

Everyone I know has at least one junk drawer. Drawers can be hard to organize without dividers of some kind, especially if you have a lot of smaller items. Good places to have drawer dividers are bathrooms and kitchens. Today I will show you how to spring clean a messy drawer, and I will use a messy drawer from my bathroom to give you an idea for how to section off objects that are similar so that those items are easier to find.

Not only will you save time in finding the objects that you own, but those objects will be better taken care of, because they will not be thrown and manhandled while jostling around in the drawer. Eyeshadow, for example, when tossed around, can break and will require more money to replace because of rough treatment. Eyeliner pencils can break inside when tossed around also.

The first thing you will want to do is empty the drawer completely. Clean out the drawer with a damp cloth, and then dry with a paper towel. You will want to have dividers of some kind, either a drawer organization system like I show you in the video, or a wooden silverware tray that I also show you in the video. Or you can use small boxes, bins, or baskets to place inside your drawer to contain your items so they are not bouncing around.

messy-drawer-organization

After emptying and cleaning the drawer, and placing the containers in the drawer, you can look at all your items and get rid of everything you are not using. Either toss it in the trash, or give it so someone who would appreciate it. With fewer items, it’s so much easier to organize.

With the remaining winning items that you like and use the most, organize them into like categories. For example, all the small bottles were placed in the back of my drawer, standing up, and they were easier to see. My smaller hair clips were easier to find when I had a whole separate container for them, placing the larger hair clips and headbands in another section. Extra toothbrushes and floss can go together, as well as makeup having its own divider.

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Hopefully by spring cleaning a messy drawer, you can feel refreshed and less bogged down by life, feeling tranquil and and good about yourself each time you pull that drawer open!

To organize your entire house and homeschooling supplies, check out Organizing for a Fun Homeschool.

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Decorating My Daughter’s Room

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

decorating-my-daughters-room-2Decorating your daughter’s room can be great fun when you string lights from the ceiling and make a gorgeous vanity. If you want to make your daughter’s room lovely, the first thing you’re going to want to do is to take everything out of the room and paint the walls a beautiful color that your daughter loves. My daughter happens to love the color pink. You might want to coordinate this with a bedspread and pillows that you will choose for the bed.

You will want to make some curtains. Curtains can be super easy to make. I do not like sewing, and I’m not good at it whatsoever. So you can do this, too. Get a piece of gorgeous cloth that goes with the bedspread and wall colors. Hem it all the way around. (Actually, you can iron the edges down, then use fabric glue for no sewing!) Then loop it and sew it across the top (or use more fabric glue.) The curtain rod goes through the tunnel that you’ve created on that one end. As you can see in the video, the colors of the wall and curtains were the exact same colors in the bedspread, even though I got them at different stores on separate days. Take a small pillow with you in the car. Then walk into the fabric store, showing the cashier that the pillow is yours, and you want to match it. They will let you go in and get the precise shade you need.

You can add a sweet canopy over the bed. If you can’t find one inexpensively, you can make one yourself with a hoola hoop and gauzy fabric. Attach it with a hook to the ceiling. Your daughter should be able to see it above her head when she is lying down on her bed.

decorating-my-daughters-roomNow you want to make a unique vanity for your daughter’s room. This is the piece de resistance of the bedroom, and it will help your daughter brush her hair so that it’s not looking stringy all the time. First hang up a mirror. Then screw a long basket under the mirror with two screws. This will hold all the brushes, combs, and hair clips that your daughter has. You can get a pencil holder for containing the brushes and combs. You can get other items from an office supply store that can be used for organizing desk drawers. Small containers help to divide head bands, pony tails, ribbons, and clips. If you have no money, you can spray paint some small boxes (like check book boxes) black. Wait overnight for the box to dry before putting it into the basket. Find a vanity chair, or spray paint a stool to match the mirror and other items in the bedroom. And don’t forget to hang up a string of silk flowers, hooking them around your mirror like a garden bower.

Last but not least, I hung up some Chinese lanterns across the top of my daughter’s room. They were actually two strings of Christmas lights surrounded by tissue paper boxes. I got a white extension cord and ran it behind the doll house and curtain to the ceiling, hooking it into the ceiling at regular intervals. Now her room looks magical, like a beautiful garden party whenever she turns off the light.

For more ways to decorate and organize your home, take a look at how I transformed a woman’s disorganized homeschool room in Homeschool Room Makeover.

 

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Tips for Organizing a Shared Closet

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

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How do you share a closet with one or two other people? How do you find enough space to hang everyone’s clothing? And how can you keep track of whose clothing is whose? These simple tips will help transform your closet nightmare into a usable space to store your children’s clothing.

Tips for Organizing a Shared Closet:

  • Use a different color hanger for each person. When choosing a color, don’t choose light blue and white, because they are too similar. Don’t choose dark blue and black for the same reason. Choose contrasting colors like black and white.
  • If all you have is boys sharing the closet, there is no reason for the bar to be so high. You can either have two bars, or put shelving underneath the bar for further storage.
  • Pare down to what you need to hang up. Don’t own a million clothes. Your children will never wear more than 10-20 outfits anyway. All the others will just sit there because they are too scratchy or ugly or ho-hum to your children. Ask your children which clothing they hate, and try to eliminate those to avoid tears when you’re hurrying your children up on Sunday mornings for church. (That’s all you need is for church people to twist their heads to gawk at your children’s tear-stained faces. Avoid this scenario. Get rid of unwanted clothing.)
  • If you have a suit, hang the pants, the shirt, the vest, the tie, and the jacket on one hanger. Get rid of all ties except for the best one for each suit.
  • If you get rid of most of your clothing that you never wear, you will have plenty of space to hang up sweaters, which take up way too much space in a drawer. Hang the sweater up with the turtleneck shirt you will wear under it. This makes it easier for your child to pull it out and wear it, rather than trying to hunt down the shirt that needs to go under it.
  • Put the long-sleeve shirts together, the short-sleeve shirts together, the sweaters together, and so on.
  • Have all the clothing facing one direction so that you can see the fronts of the shirts as you flick through them.

In this video, I show you tips on organizing a shared closet, so that you can see what I’m talking about:

Wouldn’t you love to transform your entire homeschool space? Why not grab a copy of Organizing for a Fun Homeschool today!

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Organizing the Bedroom

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

organizing-the-bedroom

The key to keeping your house organized is to get rid of everything except what you use all the time and what you love. If you can do this one thing, your house will be simpler to organize. When you have fewer things, your cupboards aren’t crowded, and you don’t have to crush your clothes and wrinkle them by pushing them down to close the drawer. You can’t even see what’s in your closet if the clothes are smashed against each other. Get rid of everything you can, and the extra space will bring you tranquility of mind.

Since I mentioned the bedroom, let’s start there. Open your closet and dump all of your hanging clothes onto your bed. Now grab the items that you use all the time and that you love. Get rid of all the rest. Do the same with your drawers. Dump them out, and put back only what you love and use all the time. Put the rest in a bag for Goodwill. Do the same for shoes, scarves, and anything else in your bedroom. Clear bins are good for storing scarves, snow boots, or other things that aren’t used every day, but that you want to keep. Stack the bins on shelves, or get flat containers to be stored under the bed.

Necklaces can be hung on a wooden rack, with short pegs coming out of a decorated slab of wood. This way your necklaces will not be tangled when you want them, and they are all visible to see what matches your outfit.

The closets in the children’s bedrooms should be rearranged depending on what you have to store. You can lower the bar and add more shelves if your child is small. The shelves can hold bins that are labeled with toys that are similar, like cars and trucks in one bin, and legos in another bin. You might even want to cut out a picture from the original packaging of a toy, and stick it with packing tape onto the bin so a child knows what is in each bin, and how to clean up after playing.

organized-drawer

You should regularly go through your children’s clothing to see if they have outgrown some of their clothes, especially if they’ve just had a birthday. Also, get rid of toys that only keep the attention of your child for five minutes. Open-ended toys are better, and they can even be stored in a pantry, laundry room, or a garage, as long as they are in bins. They can be rotated so that toys are always interesting.

If you would like a virtual tour of my home and how I organize it, check out my workshop Organizing for a Fun Homeschool.

We were named a top organizing and decluttering expert by Redfin. Check out the article we were featured in: 30 Organizing Tips to Maintain a Tidy Home

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