Chefs are in the kitchen the entire time cooking up some delicious meals.  They also require that there kitchens function properly in organization.  They keep a tight shift on their kitchen organization so let’s learn something from the experts.  Pots and pans are hard to store because of the awkward shapes and sizes; and having numerous spices can take up quite a bit of room and present a problem when it comes to organization.

Spice organizers help to reduce the clutter of spices and give more space for other items.  Fortunately, there are many different ways to organize spices with all the different types of spice organizers.  You can choose from spice shelves, acrylic spice racks, adjustable spice organizers, spice racks, and spice drawer organizers.  You can even choose to use labels to make spices more identifiable. Every spice can now have a home with Spice Organizers at Organizeworld. 

To get your pots and pans organized for using them in a timely matter, you can get yourself an overhead pan holder. The type that you prefer is up to you with all the different sizes that are available today. There are Oval and Rectangular overhead pot and pan holders for a more traditional look.  There are also those that have a reversible arch, known as Z racks and J racks, which are more contemporary. Pot and Pan Holders and along with many other products can help to organize your kitchen.

Tax season is coming to an end making it the perfect time to reorganize your files and documents.  Nothing seems to waste more time, energy, and money than being unorganized for taxes. After organizing files, you will have easy access to future and past tax documents.  Binders can be a decent way to organize some current documents that may need saving, but they are bulky and limited in holding different papers.  An Expanding File helps to hold many current documents that are different in size and category in a very inexpensive manner.  After organizing current records in file folders, filing cabinets, or expanding files, you can focus on past documents.  Items like receipts, warranties, etc. may have no use for your current situation so they can now be disposed of.  Everything else that you feel you really need, store them.  Bankers boxes or other inexpensive containers can be found at many local office supply stores.  Try to keep the containers small to avoid the build up of documents.  On certain documents that you do not need the original copy of, you may even want to scan them and file them electronically.  Doing this can save more space then you ever thought possible.

Spring is coming up fast and you know what that means…. Spring Cleaning! It is the time of the year where you clean the entire home and reorganize for the coming year. Before you spend an entire weekend cleaning, you might want to organize a few small areas to make spring cleaning simpler and easier. The kitchen is a great area to organize because there is so much to do and you can pick and choose what you would like to organize. The projects are short and attainable.

Cabinet shelves can be organized by placing freestanding shelves on top. You can provide yourself with more vertical space to organize your bowls and cups. To organize plates you can try an under-shelf organizer. This item goes over a shelf edge to provide space underneath to hold plates. This cleans out your cabinets as well as keeps you plates easily accessible.

Organizing canned goods is also a great step towards kitchen organization. Try looking through all of your canned goods and getting rid of the ones that have expired. As you do this, organize your cans by expiration dates. Then find a can organizer that will use the first in, first out method and place the cans closest to expiring in first. This allows you to use older cans first to prevent canned goods from expiring.

Organize drawers so that the items in the drawer are always organized and accessible. It is relatively frustrating for someone to try to find a certain item and it can be anywhere in the drawer. Try placing a drawer divider that fits the entire drawer to organize all of the contents within.

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.