A 12-Month Plan to an Organized Home
Sometimes organizing your home feels too overwhelming. The closets are jam-packed, there’s no room in the garage for another box, and the clutter just keeps piling up. It’s time to step back from the chaos and create a plan of attack. Plans are most effective when they feel like they’re achievable, so it’s important to break them into bite-sized pieces. This twelve-month plan to an organized home can help you have a completely organized home in a year.
Of course, if you’re feeling extra motivated, you can push through the plan as fast as you’d like. In fact, my friend Becky has a new “7-days to freedom from clutter” course you might consider!
Month One: Organize the Master Bedroom
Why start organizing your house with the master bedroom? Well, often the master bedroom is the most personal room in your home. It’s where you spend a significant portion of your life. It’s also where you reconnect with your significant other. But perhaps most importantly, organizing your bedroom is a manageable way to start your year of organizing.
Divide your bedroom belongings into three main piles – keep, donate, toss. If you cannot manage your entire bedroom in one day or weekend then break it down by space. For example, each day clean out the closet, dresser, under the bed, and so on.
Related: 6 Easy Steps to a Clutter-free Home
Month Two: Organize the Main Bathroom
It’s amazing what collects in medicine cabinets and under the bathroom sink. Grab a garbage can and throw the junk out. Reorganize what you keep by using labels and storage containers.
One of my favorite bathroom organizational tools with kids is giving each kid a plastic pencil box to store their personal items (toothbrush, comb, deodorant, etc.) – then these boxes can be neatly stacked under the sink for easy access in the mornings.
Related: How to Makeover Your Medicine Cabinet with Essential Oils
Month Three: Organize the Kitchen
The kitchen can be a big job. Often there are a lot of extra dishes and small appliances. For example, you might have two blenders. Repeat the keep, donate, toss process this month in your kitchen. Reorganize and remember there must be a space for everything you keep.
Month Four: Take a Break and Reflect
Take it off and reassess your organizing systems in your bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Fix what isn’t working.
Month Five: Organize the Guest Bedroom/Home Office
Your guest room may also be a home office or den, but it is also a great place to squeeze in some extra storage. 101 Days of Organization has some great ideas on how to organize your guest room to accommodate extra storage without looking cluttered.
Related: How to Organize a Catch-All Closet
Month Six: Organize the Kids’ Bedrooms
Get them involved in the keep, donate, toss process. If you’re willing, consider holding a garage sale or taking items to a resale shop in town. Children’s items sell quickly and your children might be motivated by the money they can earn by getting rid of some of their stuff.
Related: How to Organize Baby Laundry in Small Spaces
Month Seven: Organize Any Additional Bathrooms
If you have additional bathrooms to organize, use the tips from month two to organize these additional spaces.
Related: Teaching Kids to Clean the Bathroom [+ free printable cleaning chart]
Month Eight: Take a Break
If you haven’t held a garage sale yet then now is the time. Additionally, evaluate the organizing systems you created in your guest bedroom or home office and your children’s rooms. Fix anything that isn’t working.
Related: 5 Secrets of an Organized Mom
Month Nine: Organize the Garage
Honestly, the garage is usually the worst place in most people’s homes. They like to shove things in there and forget about them. You may need to focus on your garage the entire month using all your weekends to get the job done.
Month Ten: Family/Living Room
Depending on your family’s rhythms/habits, the living room may be one of the more cluttered spaces in your home, or it may just need a quick cleanup. In our home, we have one main living space, so we use a lot of functional furniture to keep things organized and uncluttered in this area.
Pieces like storage ottomans (for throw blankets and pillows), bookshelves (for games, books, and more), and baskets (to hide loose items on the bookshelves) are the keys to keeping our living room organized. We try to declutter these storage/organizational pieces regularly by sorting the items in them and purging older items when adding new ones.
Related: Tips for Effective Playroom Organization
Month Eleven: Dining Room and any extra rooms you’ve missed
If your house is like ours, you may be able to take month eleven off! But perhaps you have a dining room with storage, or maybe your dining room table is the catch-all for your family to dump all the papers, supplies, and odds and ends.
Decluttering this space (or another room that needs to be decluttered and organized) will follow the same patterns as above – gather all loose items then keep, toss, or put away.
And while you’re at it, it might be a good time to do a deep clean of the table and chairs, wiping down all the surfaces really well.
Related: Teaching Kids to Clean Up After Dinner
Month Twelve: Basement and/or Attic
Wherever you store all the “off-season” items, you’re likely to have amassed quite a bit of “junk” or items that you no longer need or want. As you sort through the boxes of items in storage, be sure to carefully label any that aren’t easily identified and pull out the items you are ready to pass on or purge.
With each room, try to keep the three-tier system in mind when returning items into the space. Your keep items need to have a proper place to be appreciated and used. In most cases, one weekend a month is all it takes to overhaul the room. Over the course of a year, you’ll transform your entire home into an efficiently organized and clutter-free space.
Freed From Clutter Course
My friend Becky from Your Modern Family has an amazing new Freed From Clutter Course that I highly recommend!
As a mom of four young kids, she knows about clutter… and she knows how great it feels to clear out the clutter & get organized. It just keeps your life more focused and organized, so you can stop worrying about your ‘stuff’ and start paying attention to what matters. You can let go of the ‘things’ that are weighing you down to find time for the more important parts of your life.
The 7-day course consists of challenges for homes of all clutter levels whether you’ve been cluttered for years or you’ve only been cluttered since having kids. This course will benefit you and dramatically transform your home into an organized, clean, clutter-free zone.
Your home should be a place where you can walk in a say “ahh…” and just feel good about being there. It should bring you a feeling of peace and joy and happiness. It will become your favorite place to be.
Enroll in the course today –> Freed From Clutter
