How To Organise Your House

How To Organise Your House | How To Relieve Stress

How to organise your house using easy and simple techniques guaranteed to ease and relieve stress. These house cleaning tips will allow you that extra time to do something more fun and relaxing and will enhance life balance.

Having an unorganised home is one of the most popular triggers of stress, and by far usually the one which is harder to control due to outside variables such as pets and children. So is all lost? No, of course not, where there is a will there is a way! How to organise your house can be simple by following short basic steps and even the smallest change will show a noticeable improvement.

HOW TO ORGANISE YOUR HOUSE

The Hall of Heroes
The first step on how to organise your house is to look at how someone else will approach your house. The first point of contact is the front door porch and your hallway. A clean and clear hallway is great for everyone. It is incredibly annoying after a long day at work to get home and then bury your way through the hallway to get to the kitchen, or after a rainy day and a long walk you run home and your hallway is so cluttered that it too gets a good soaking.

Here are some handy tips:

~ Have a shoe rack; metal or wooden however wooden racks are a lot better as some metal shoe racks can be unstable so after a week or two you find yourself attacking it. Placing it by the door is usually the best position for it, ready for you and others to take off their shoes without coming too far into the house.

~ A door mat to wipe your shoes, having an indoor and outdoor is preferable as it saves the time and effort of having to scrub the carpet clean if someone walks in with muddy shoes.

~ A key rack or stand to keep all your keys together.

~ A hallway cabinet or box can be useful if you find that small random objects enter random rooms but do not have a permanent home.

~ Minimise objects left on the window sill if you have one in your hallway. Windows are focal points in any room, so a clean tidy windows, frames and ledges are golden.

The Clean, Gene, Cooking Machine.

We all dread washing the pots after consuming that tasty dinner we just ate, especially if we have eaten too much and feel like having a nap. How about you try this out….

Whilst cooking, try washing up along the way. Run the hot water and have ready a bowl of hot fairy liquid water therefore once you have used that pan dip it in, wash and leave on the drainer. It will add no more than a few minutes to the cooking time however will save you at least 15 minutes as you will not have to spend ages trying to clean pots and pans where food has become dry, hard and almost not cleanable.

Once all food has been dished up, there will be no pots to clean so quickly wipe down the sides and then scamper off to eat your own food. Adding no more than an extra 30 seconds to your time and the kitchen is spotless.

Once food has been eaten, if you are in a rush do not worry about washing up the plates and cutlery, as long as they are neatly stacked ready to wash for when you have the time all is good. Also, seeing that your kitchen is spotless from pots and pans a small little pile of a couple of plates is a sign of relief as they require little effort to clean!

A nice little tip if you ever cook something and the pots and pans are a pain to clean…. boil the kettle and put a droplet of fairy liquid in the dirty pot. Pour the hot water into the pot and leave for about 5-10 minutes then using a kitchen brush scrub around the pan and rinse, all the food stuck should come away a lot easier. This is handy especially if you have cooked stuffing or baked a cake and some food has become stuck or has burnt onto the pan.

The Sneaky Red Sock and the Mysterious Odd Ones
We all know how entertaining doing the laundry is; rooting through dirty socks hoping that we wash them in pairs, making sure t-shirts are turned inside out and hoping we don’t accidentally add that red sock to a whites wash.

How do avoid these issues? How do we reduce the chance of getting the odd sock? Well the answer is no secret, it is all about organisation. How to organise your house can involve any issue that stresses you, and one main stressor is the irritation of doing the laundry and always losing that one sock. I use to question myself sometimes; “where could the sock have gone?”…. “Did I even put it in the wash?”…. “Was there ever a second sock?” I have on the odd occasion blamed the washing machine for perhaps stealing or eating my sock… it could happen. So I decided that the poor washing machine had had enough abusive and I put into place the ‘laundry basket machinator’ hoping the Terminator phrase “I’ll be back” will bring some luck to my socks.

It was nothing technical, just two baskets; one for whites and one for reds and colours. I’d pair up socks when I put them in the appropriate basket to reduce the chance of one wandering and getting lost which helped a lot. I now only have two odd socks, which are only odd because one sock had a hole and the other disappeared, but wearing dark blue and light blue socks is mostly not noticeable by others so all is well that ends well.

Ducks in the Tub
The bathroom is one of my favourite rooms in a house. A large bathroom with a massive bath tub, a separate shower cubicle and a heated towel rack would make me a very happy lady. However with any large bathroom comes a larger amount of cleaning so I appreciate my small bathroom most of the time. There are several annoying factors in relation to my bathroom; the accumulation of dust on the tiled floor, on the toilet seat and well everywhere else. The only cleaning chore I really need to do is dusting in my bathroom which seems rather bizarre as my TV and stand gather less dust.

Here are some handy tips on having an organised bathroom:

~ Organising your toiletries is gold. I have a small window ledge in my bathroom and I have put all my shampoos and conditioners together on the left hand side, next is body wash, shaving cream with razors. On the right hand side I keep other toilet products. I have a short shower curtain that runs along the window so it never needs drying after I have a shower.

~ A toilet roll holder is very handy. I bet we have all been in the situation where you find there is no toilet roll, but with this handy item usually they hold 3-5 rolls.

~ A bath mat set always adds that extra neat touch to a bathroom.

~ Give the toilet a clean once a fortnight even if it does not look dirty. A quick scrub and rinse with toilet bleach is a minute job.

~ Every morning after the last person has finished in the bathroom, give the sink a quick clean. I am sometimes lazy with cleaning products therefore I use a facial wipe and just quickly wipe around the sink and the taps, then a rinse with water. A minute job.

Loving the Lounge
A minimalistic look always makes a room look a lot tidier. However in larger household items will appear in the lounge and even if you put them back in its original home it somehow always ends up back where you found it. One solution I find that fits the bill is a container, they are very handy to put items in that basically will not go away. It is also a sneaky way to hide objects quickly to give the illusion is tidy.

So what are the main problems with a lounge? Well if you have wooden floors its the accumulation of dust, general mess, hovering and rubbish.

Here are some simple tips to help you:

~ Have a small bin so that any rubbish can be put away.

~ Hoover when needed or regularly on a fortnightly basis.

~ Have a coffee table with a shelf underneath in your lounge. These are useful to place magazines, tv guides and newspapers on without making a mess.

~ A lounge container or box for random items, this can be kept under the coffee table to either avoid being seen or just to make the lounge more presentable.

~ If you have children or a large household try and begin a routine where if you bring an item into the lounge it has to leave once it has been finished with, therefore potential mess is being removed.

~ Declutter any window ledges and put random items in the random items box.

TOP TIPS ON HOW TO ORGANISE YOUR HOUSE

1. A random items box in each room, these items will be tidied later.

2. Always have a permanent clean room.

3. Containers in each room to put away items of which have no permanent home.

4. Shoe box or shoe shelves…. shoe racks can be a pain to set up and cause stress when they break (easily).

5. A key hanger in the hallway or kitchen to keep all your keys.

6. Fairy liquid or facial wipes in your bathroom for quick cleans.

7. A family calendar is very handy to organise a variety of responsibilities and remember key events.

8. Filing cabinet/filing system or box for kid’s school document, another for work related document and a third for house related documents.

9. Have a box or drawer dedicated to stationary, stamps and envelopes.

10. Keep receipts in a plastic wallet or something similar.

11. Minimalise items on view.

12. Hoover when needed or on a fortnightly basis.

13. Clean whilst you cook.

14. Having a whites and darks laundry basket.

15. Having a door mat.

16. Joining socks when they are put into the laundry basket.

17. A bath mat set.

18. Scrub the toilet fortnightly or when needed.

19. Arranging toiletries neatly and having a toilet roll holder.

20. Crockery that is difficult to clean soak in hot water.

Hopefully this article on how to organise your house will help you reduce the impact of stress on your life as well as make your home environment more friendly.