Dorm rooms today allow for a college student to live close to campus, but not comfortably. Dorms are small and not equipped for organized and spacious living. College students can have the toughest time organizing a dorm room because the area is so small; there is not much to work with. A good place to start dorm organization is to actually determine what items you need as one resides in a dorm. Minimizing what you have to organize is the easiest first step in organizing a small space. Wall organizers are great if you can wall mount or use adhesive products. Using wall organizers help to keep desks clean so that more important items such as books, pencils, calculators and more can have a home. Don’t forget that there is usually space underneath the bed. Keep items that you don’t need too often such as seasonal clothes, hobby items, and others underneath the bed. Building on vertical space will also give much more room then you could ever imagine. Use items that will stack on top of one another so that you can use vertical space and not take up horizontal floor space which can create clutter.  Avoid storage boxes and bins because these types of storage options can cause clutter in such a confined space.

Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of soft vs. hard storage containers?

 A: Soft containers are great because they are flexible.  Wreaths come in many different sizes and storage containers for them are usually only available in certain sizes.  With hard storage containers, you must purchase the exact size or your item may not fit.  A disadvantage of a soft container is that they are not able to stack well.  They can fall over in stacks or even worse, the item inside can become damaged.  Most hard storage containers are built to stack because those containers can handle more weight. 

Q: Why is a spool so important for decorative lights?

A:  Holiday lights are lined together through small electric cords and are built as a series circuit.  This means that if a short in the wire occurs, only the lights before the short will function properly.  Spools help to prevent shorts from occurring by avoiding tangling and crunching of the wires.

Q: Should I throw away gift bags correct?

A:  Not necessarily.  Throwing away a gift bag is usually not the best solution for you because they can be recycled.  Some gift bags can be kept and recycled to be used again later in the future.

Q:  Why should I spend so much on holiday decoration storage?

A: Decorations for the holidays can be quite expensive in the long run.  You are really protecting your investments when you choose quality storage containers instead of cardboard boxes and other flimsy storage containers.  Lights, wreaths, and artificial trees are all bought to last many years and so should your holiday storage containers.

Holiday storage containers have their own category here.

Before you conduct a yard sale, you should know why and how it is going to be done.

Here are some question to ask yourself:
• Why a yard sale and not ebay or Craigs list?
• Are you downsizing a home, moving, or just wanting to clear stuff or earn some money?

The answers to these questions might help in your planning. In general, here are some things you can think about:
1. One of the first steps in organizing items for a yard sale is to decide when you are going to have it. Having a date in mind will give your yard sale a sense of reality and help you to make decisions about what you will sell and what you will keep. Having a yard sale date on the calendar will also give you the motivation to actually have the yard sale. Nothing happens without a goal and a plan. I often work with clients who want to have a yard sale but until I work with them, they never do.
2. Next you need to go through your home or office and select items that you will sell. Be decisive and consider if you use, need, or love the item. If not, it is a good candidate for the sale. Is the item easily replaced? Make sure that the items are not broken and that they are in good condition.
3. Start sorting. Organize your yard sale in the same way you look for things in a department store and sort your items by category, i.e. kitchen items, appliances, linens, household items such as lamps, throw pillows, clothes, luggage, sporting goods, auto, etc.
4. Price your items. To get an idea what things go for shop other yard sales or check Ebay or Craigs list.
5. Advertise your sale in the newspaper, on the internet, use flyers and get the word out. Make sure you know how much lead time you need to place an ad.
6. The day of the sale, make sure you start early! Yard sale shoppers are early birds and will sometimes line up a good half hour or more before your advertised sale time. You may want to decide if you are going to allow early shoppers or not?
7. Find out if your neighborhood, city, or county have rules or regulations about yard sales.
8. NOTE: Most yard sales that I have organized and worked are pretty much over by late morning or by noon. Things are for the most part “picked over” by then. You can wait for more buyers… or start giving things away so that you do not have to haul stuff off to Goodwill yourself.

Good luck with your sale.

Often purging is the most difficult step when organizing an area.  Here are tips on purging that were recently brought to our attention by a professional organizer colleague.

A major step to organizing most areas is removing every single item from the area and then deciding which items to keep.

Because it is often too difficult to let go of your possessions, purging is also one of the most emotionally difficult stages to organizing an area.

A great suggestion that was recently given to us was to use a trusted friend or family member to help you. This would be someone who will honestly give you an opinion of whether or not an item should be kept, and someone who has opinions you respect. You can consider this person a “shopping buddy” who is shopping with you — only the store is your closet or pantry.

One note however: Be careful not to, for example, choose your husband or wife to be your “shopping buddy” if an honest opinion like, “You haven’t worn those jeans for years because they won’t fit and they probably won’t fit any time soon,” will offend you. The truth to this opinion is that you may fit those jeans in the future, in which case you buy that size again…in the meantime, they go to Goodwill.

We are bombarded with different types of mail on a daily basis. The types of mail vary from magazines, advertisements, catalogs, postcards, and then the mail that is really important – bills, letters, legal paperwork, and so on. Use these hints to separate your mail on a daily basis.

First create a filing system for your mail. The filing system should be a two part system: one part for “junk mail” and the other part for important mail (mail that needs to be processed by a certain date). The “junk mail” file should have a file for catalogs, coupons, ads, and sales. This file will function not only as a file for shopping and services items that came in the mail, but for all shopping and services materials that you want to reference in the future. The separate file, for important mail, should be a filing system ordered by date (you can find good Bill Organizers at Organize It).

Your mail center should have a small paper bin (one that will keep you from piling up more than a week’s worth of mail). You should also have the two filing systems described above and a large trash bin to immediately throw away any unwanted mail. Therefore, your mail center will have everything you need to quickly place your mail in the proper container.

Catalogs need to be scanned to see if the products inside are something that may interest you in the future
• If the catalog is not of interest to you, immediately throw it out.
• If the catalog is of interest to you, rip out the cover page and file it. The cover should have a website address that you can use later to shop. Throw away the rest of the catalog.
• In the future you can always reference the website to shop. You can put a note on the cover to write down the item number that interest you, as most catalog websites let you shop by the catalog’s item number.

Advertisements can often be annoying, but sometimes they can be useful.

• If you receive an advertisement that is useless to you, immediately throw it away.
• If the advertisement is something that may be useful to you, either because it is a product or service that you have thought about purchasing or it generates an idea you haven’t thought of, then keep it and file it.

Magazines are something you probably want to keep, otherwise you would not have subscribed to it in the first place.

• If you are the type of person that likes to read a magazine and then throw it away, that works great.
• If you are the type of person that likes to read a magazine and then keep it, then you should invest in a yearly magazine organizer like this one: Magazine Organizer

Coupons sometimes come in the mail and then are forgotten, creating a pile of what becomes junk mail.

• Cut out coupons immediately and file them in a small sized coupon organizer that can fit in a file and travel with you when you shop. One like this
  Coupon Organizers works great.

Bills and other important mail that need to be taken care of by a certain date, need to be in a filing system out in the open that is organized by date.

• When you get a bill, immediately place it ten days or more, by date, in the file.
• On a daily basis, check for the bills and mail near the current date and take care of this important mail.

Being organized is what feels comfortable; it is what works for you, and sometimes being organized looks like a mess, so don’t let criticism cramp your style. Be confident that having a messy desk is okay, if it is organized.

If the mess on top of your desk is comfortable and if you are not losing productivity, then in essence you are organized. For most organized people with messy desks, the mess on top of the desk is a get-it-done-now box. For example, if the piles are high, then there is a lot of work to do, but if the desk is clean, then work is complete. Therefore, having a neat desk is a visible symbol of the hard work that was accomplished. And that feels good.

It is very important that the desktop is a comfortable and productive place to work. Distinguish the difference between being comfortable with a mess and having a productive area to work. Your work area needs to serve its purpose. If for example, the piles on top of the desk cover the entire working surface of the desk, it would be very difficult for you to be productive. If the piles are covering up or in the way of key instruments, like mouse pads, pencil sharpeners, calculators, and calendars, then it would also be hard for you to be productive.

So be confident when criticism comes your way about how much of a mess your desk is. When someone criticizes your desk, proudly say, “I am organized,” and know deep down inside, that if you are being productive, that it is true. But remember, it can be a fine line between a productive mess and an unproductive one.

Shelf dividers and labels are an organizing staple and they especially have a very useful role in keeping items categorized on shelves. For example, if you are organizing pantry shelves, you can divide the basics like broth, tomatoes, beans, pasta, and rice from spices and condiments. In a closet, you can divide folded work shirts from off-day shirts.

When you add labeling to these divided sections, this becomes as close to fool proof as you can get when maintaining order on your shelves.  Simple label machines can be found in most office stores. Not only will you be labeling shelves, but you may find yourself labeling binders, files, and drawers

View more in our shelf and drawer divider section.

Children find it more difficult to be organized than adults. It’s not only because they need to learn to be put things away or to choose to want an organized area, but also because their area usually isn’t “child friendly” when it comes to organization.

Let’s use a child’s bedroom closet, as an example: in this case, the hanging rod usually is out of reach, the shelves are too high, and the floor allows too much space for items to be stored and not organized. Therefore, one part of the child’s room that can be easily disorganized is the closet. The first step in helping a child to learn and to become organized is to give your child the tools to easily put things away and the ability to categorize their belongings.

In many instances, the design of the closet is what makes it difficult to for a child’s closet to become organized. To help your child organize his closet, you have to first make the closet easy for the child to use.

Here are tips and items to help make a child’s closet “child friendly”:
• In most cases, the closet bar is too high for your child. If the closet bar is unreachable, he or she will not be able tho hang their clothes In this case, the child will be forced to leave it on the floor or on the bed for the parent to put away. You can solve this problem by adding an extra closet bar within your child’s reach. By doing so, you are helping your child do the organizing by themselves.
• Using a closet organizer is a good idea. You may find so many designs in your favorite home accessories’ store. The more flexible the system, the better, because the closet can be adjusted and changed as your child grows. freedomRail is a good choice because of its strength — no worries about the system crashing down on your child if your child climbs shelves to reach something up high.
• Buy containers that can be stored in the lower section of the closet so your kid can organize and categorize her belongings. See-through plastic containers work great, so that the child can easily see its contents. Have the child take a picture of each container’s contents, and tape it to the front of the container, so that she knows what belongs in the container.
• Have your child purge items they no longer use. Let him know that he is unable to have new items if he doesn’t decide to get rid of unused items — Christmas and Birthday are great times for this.

Involve your child in the organizing process. This allows the child to take ownership of the process and feel responsible for keeping their area organized.

Go to kids closet organizers to find tools to help a child organize their closet.

One thing about being organized is that you know exactly where the item you are looking for is, at the time you need it. This is exactly what happens with an organized drawer, but it is usually not the case with a junk drawer.

It is just too easy to just dump items in drawers, because they are out of site. Over time, as this dumping continues, the drawer becomes and absolute disorganized mess — hence the term, “junk drawer”. Drawers should never be stuffed with gadgets and utensils. Your drawers need to be labeled with a name besides “junk”. They need a real purpose like: utensil, silverware, knife, office accessory, and so on.

Everything in the drawer should be used on a regular basis (at least once every two to four weeks) and should be easy to access.

Is your drawer up to the test? Let’s see:

1. 1. Take everything out of your utensil or gadget drawer and put these items in a box.
2. 2. Leave this box on your countertop or on a shelf.
3. 3. Everytime you use one of the items, put it back in the drawer.

Do this for two to four weeks.

Having an organized pantry saves big time: it saves money, saves time, saves stress, and saves mess and waste from occurring. With an organized, labeled, and categorized pantry you will spend less money buying duplicate items, less time looking for ingredients, and there will be less items breaking, spilling, and spoiling.

The same basic ideas used to organize most areas are used to organize a pantry. In general, purge first, then place the most often used items in the easiest area to access, and finally categorize. By doing this, unnecessary and unused items are removed, the pantry becomes easier to use, and it becomes easier to maintain.

Here are Simple Steps to Organize a Pantry:

• The first step is to purge items that are never used, have expired, are have gone bad. To do this, take everything off the shelves and separate the keepers from the “space wasters”.
• Next put heavy items on the bottom shelves. Items like appliances and other cooking devices fit the mold.
• Then place items that you rarely use up high and in the hard to reach nooks.
• Place the most used items, by type, on the eye level shelves. For example, put spices together, cereals and breakfast items together, baking goods together, and so on.
• Now, use shelf dividers and labels to ensure that the pantry stays organized. Divide every category with shelf dividers (even something obvious like cereal or spices) and then label each section. This makes sure that no category infringes on another and that each item has a labeled home.
• As an option, use clear stackable canisters, can dispensers, and step shelves to make the shelves easier to use.

This project should take one to four hours depending on the size of your pantry. Before you start, have garbage bags, shelf dividers, and a label machine ready for use.

Good Luck.