EP 004: How to Organize Your Home with Intention
July 20, 2020 | By Ashley Brown
Organizing your home with intention can be so life giving. It saves you time and creates ease when you know where everything is. But setting up your home with intention is so much more than just organizing your stuff. It’s about decluttering and making sure that each room and space is used in a way that makes sense for you and your family. In this episode you’ll learn exactly how to set-up your home in an intuitive way that’ll make life easier.
IN THIS EPISODE ASHLEY DISCUSSES:
Introduction to organizing your home.
How to set your home up with intention.
Why you should want to set things up this way.
Intuitively organizing your home.
Ashley’s best decluttering tip.
How not to organize your home.
The first thing you want to do before you begin organizing your home.
Tips and practical solutions on organization.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Getting started with decluttering (EP 007: Decluttering 101)
Ashley’s Facebook group
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I get it some days it feels as if you're riding the "hot mess" express and there's no end in sight. Hello, I'm Ashley Brown, mom of three little kids who used to let life's chaos get the best of me. Then I discovered that you can elevate your life, raise kids and make what matters happen all while adding a little more elegance into your everyday lifestyle.
I'm on a mission to help busy women overcome the hot mess and create an elegant life they love by starting with the essentials. Everyday life doesn't have to be so chaotic. Join me in discussions about ways to help you embrace simplicity with practical solutions and easy to implement ideas. So you can design a home and life you love. This is a source of encouragement. This is the change you've been looking for. This is the always elegant living podcast.
Hello again, friends. Welcome to episode number four of The Always Elegant Living Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley Brown and I help busy women eliminate the everyday chaos in their home so they can start living a life full of ease. In this episode, we're discussing how to organize your home in a life giving way. The past few episodes, we've been talking a lot about home. In episode 002, we talked about how to embrace essentialism in your home. In episode 003, we talked about how to create systems in your home. And today we're going to talk about how to organize your home in an intentional way. I love focusing on home as often as I can, because life starts at home. It's so hard to be a better person if your environment is completely overwhelming. And so many women often feel overwhelmed by their homes. I've made it my mission to help these women eliminate the overwhelm at home so they can go forth and be who they were made to be.
How can you wholeheartedly show up for work and focus on your career, when you're always thinking about your home life and your never ending to do list? How can you chase your dream when you're constantly bogged down by home tasks? How can you even relax at the end of a long day when you won't allow yourself to sit, because your home is just too overwhelming. Everywhere you look something's calling for you and you have to take care of it. Your home is constantly needing your intention. I'm on a mission to put a stop to all of this home overwhelm and that's why we're going to keep talking about it. My goal is to empower you, to take action and give you the tactical tips and easy to implement ideas so you can take back control in your home and in turn your life. So how do you organize your home?
Really what I want you to do, is I want you to think about it in a different way. Look at your home in a different way. I like to think about it as, "How do you set up your home for success?" What does that actually mean? Well, to me, setting up my home for success means that I have what I need, where I need it. And it all makes sense. For example, the dishes. When I unload the dishwasher, I want to make sure that the cups go away right where the dishwasher is. And it's just easy to put them away. Also, my shelf where the cups go is right by the refrigerator, which is where we grab cups to fill with drinks or water. To me, that makes sense. And that's how I prefer to set it up. I also like the plates over by the stove because when I'm cooking, I'm going to quickly grab a plate and put food on it while I'm standing by the stove.
So that would be a set-up that's really life giving an easy and with intention and purpose behind it. Let me give you another example. In our last house, before we moved, it was much smaller. So we had flipped the living room and dining room. The room that was intentionally meant to be the dining room just didn't make sense to me. It was kind of in the middle of everything. We had to walk all the way through the dining room to get to the living room. And it just didn't make sense. Also, when you walked in the front door, we were walking into the back of the couch, because it was kind of a tight little walkway. So I thought if I flipped the rooms and put the dining room as the first room so when you first walk into the house, you all of a sudden have this huge space.
And when you're getting ready to go to the living room to relax and watch TV after you've had dinner you don't have to walk through the dining room. It was just awkward to me. So I switched it. I don't think the builder intended for it to be that way, but it was. And just by making these changes and rearranging the rooms you can really set your home up in a life giving way. That's what I mean by how to organize your home. I don't necessarily mean all the little buckets and all the little trinkets need a place. What I mean is how are we setting up our home to be intentional and life-giving? Now, in our my house, I have an office. Before it was an office, it was my daughter's bedroom. Before it was her bedroom, it was a photography studio because we didn't have her yet.
And I had the extra room to have an at home photo studio. Then we had her and I put her in there. Then after she got a little bit bigger, I decided that I really wanted an office. I wanted to bring my photo studio back home. So I put my boys together because honestly they make big messes anyways. And I might as well just have them in one room so they could just make a big mess all in that room, and I only have to clean that up once. So I bunked my boys. I gave my daughter her own room and then I took the fourth bedroom for an office/photo studio. And now it has evolved into our homeschool room, because everything going on with COVID-19, we are going to be homeschooling in the fall. So it's kind of my ever evolving room if you will. But that's how you would organize your home to be very intentional, very life giving and very on purpose. You want your home, the rooms in it and how you set things up to work for you.
And why is all of this important? It's important because if your home's not working for you, you're just going to get super frustrated. And I believe in doing what you can with what you have until you can get what you want. So before we moved into our current house, our other house was 1600 square feet. It was super small. We had five people living in it, a dog, two cats and no yard. And it was just small. And I loved that house. I loved that house so much because it was set up easily for us. I could vacuum the whole house with the cord plugged into one outlet and I loved it. We only moved because we wanted a bigger yard and we were switching school districts, which obviously does not matter right now at this time, but that's why we initially moved, for the yard. So how do you organize your home and how do you set it up with intention and purpose?
Well, here's a few steps that I want you to take. And as a side , I want you to know that this is about setting up your home in an organized way. It's not about the pretty boxes and making sure everything's Pinterest worthy and labeled. While those are very tactical tips and they're very practical for different reasons. That's not exactly what I'm talking about when I'm talking about how to organize your home. I really want you to just focus on how to set up your home. So just like how we start with creating systems (DOWNLOAD the FREE Starter Guide HERE), setting up your home, starts the same way. You need to visualize the end result. What do you want? How do you want your home to work for you? Do you need a homeschool room? Do you need an office?
Do you need a desk in your bedroom? So you can journal through some stuff or you can pay your bills. Maybe you don't want to pay your bills in your bedroom. I know I don't. So I like to have a separate desk in a different area of the house to do household tasks, not necessarily work related things, but tasks like paying bills, sign papers, or whatever it may be. I like to have a separate desk for that. Not even in my office. How can you set up your house to really have purpose behind it and organize it in a way that makes sense? Visualize how you want it to be. What would work best? Is the couch set up in the right way? Is the living room even where it should be, or do you need to switch it with the dining room? Maybe you want all of your kids in the master bedroom because it has a bathroom attached and you take a smaller bedroom.
Then the third bedroom can be an office. If you're looking for a home office or a recording studio or a photo studio or a craft room or whatever, it may be. Really, just visualize what you have and think about what you want it to be. And like I said, work with what you have until you can get what you want. I'm a huge believer in that because we sometimes think that our home doesn't work for us and we just need to move. And that may be true, but maybe it's not possible right now. So you have to work with what you have until you can get what you want. So visualize how you want things to be. What would make sense? Here's an example of when it comes to setting up the kitchen. Sometimes I go to people's houses and things are set up awkwardly. And actually this hasn't happened for a long time, but my mom is a good example of this. I would go to her house and I could never understand why the coffee cups were over by the stove.
Her coffee maker was over by the refrigerator. And I kept asking her, why she would have the coffee cups over there? You have to walk all the way across the kitchen to get coffee cups before you can even pour yourself a cup of coffee. Why wouldn't you just put the coffee cups by the coffee maker? And she's like, "I've never even thought about that. I just used that cupboard to put my baking dishes away in." Then I asked, "Why would you put baking dishes above your coffee maker and not by the stove where you're actually going to be baking?" So kind of just thinking through how to organize your home and how to set it up in an intentional way, really makes your home so much easier to live in and in turn, it makes life easier. And that's what I'm all about. Those are a couple different examples of some solutions of how to set up your home in an intentional way. Now here's a few steps to take while you're actually organizing your home.
The very first thing you want to do before you actually organizing your home, is to think about how you want to set it up. Think about where you want to put the coffee cups. Or here's one more example for you. In our current house, we don't have medicine cabinets in any of the bathrooms. And in fact, most of the bathrooms don't even have drawers in the vanities. It kind of looks a little modern. A little more than I would have liked when I was designing the house, but that's what it is. And so I've learned to work around it. I've converted part of my linen closet with shelves on it and made a medicine cabinet. And I organized all my stuff there. It's up really high. None of the kids can get into it and it works out great, other than the fact that it's not in the bathroom, but that's okay because I'm working with what I have and I'm using what I've got.
So now you've visualized how you want to organize your home or how you want to set it up for success. Now, what you need to do is you've got to declutter. You have to go through the stuff that you have and figure out what's your favorite. What do you want to keep? What is something that is worth taking up your time and the space in your house and getting rid of everything else. Decluttering for some people can be one of the most hardest challenges to overcome. For me, I personally love decluttering. I love getting rid of stuff. I love getting rid of the things that are no longer serving me and my family in this time of our life. And I'm okay with that. But it's taken a long time to get there. And I only love it so much because I know that the results from decluttering are so worth the process of decluttering. If you need help decluttering, I'm going to do another episode on that. And I'll link to it in this episode when it's ready, but you have to declutter. (Here's the episode on decluttering that I said I would do. Make sure to check it out because it's really great and answers the most commonly asked questions when it comes to decluttering).
And one of my best tips for decluttering is pull everything out of the cupboard. So say you're doing your kitchen, pull everything out of the cupboards and pick your favorites. A lot of times we have like 20 different coffee cups. Pick your favorite ones that you grabbed day after day and put those away first and use the space that you have for your favorites. And then everything else is extra. So if you no longer have any space in that cupboard for any more coffee cups, then it's really easy to declutter the rest and know that you only have your favorites. When you're decluttering, pull everything out, pick your favorites first and create homes for those. And then if space allows, you can add more stuff in. If it doesn't, then it's easy to know what to get rid of. That's one of my best tips for decluttering and all of this goes back to visualizing that end result.
So knowing that, let's keep with the coffee example. Now you know that you want to have your coffee cups by the coffee maker. Because that just makes sense. When you're grabbing coffee, you want to know that the cups are right there. When you're baking a cake, you want to know that you're baking pans are right by the oven, because why would you walk all the way and grab a pan from above your coffee maker? Mom, if you're listening to this, I'm sorry, but it was wrong. Okay. We had to fix it. But visualizing that end result and then decluttering will really help you take care of the organizing part. Once again, organizing for some may mean a lot of little boxes with labels and everything. I know for me, I do like everything to have a place in a home. But for others it could be as simple as this is the drawer for the silverware.
And it's not intentionally organized within the drawer, but the silverware is all there and it's where it makes sense. And that's fine. Whatever your personality is, whatever works best for you. That's great. I like my stuff divided in the drawers because I'm very type A like that. I like things organized. It just makes me a very happy person. And that's what it's all about. And it's easy for me and I love putting it away that way. I would never just take all the utensils out of the dishwasher and just throw them all in a drawer. I love lining them all up and making them look all organized and neat. And to me that's worth the extra 10 seconds that it takes to do... as opposed to just throwing it in the drawer. But you do you.
And by setting up your space and your home and organizing it in a way that really works with you and your family, you're really creating ease. And of course elegance while you're doing all of this. The organizational component is my way of saying... "Set up your home in a way that makes sense." There is no reason, going back to my last house, that we couldn't have the dining room where it made sense for our family and switch it to the living room. And this house, there is no reason that my kids can not share a room so we can have a third room for a homeschool and an office which is something that really we need. And that works best for us. Just because the rooms are designed one way doesn't mean that you can't give a different intention to it. And that's the point I'm trying to make. When I talk about how to organize and set up your home, set it up and set things up in a way that is life giving to you and your family and that makes sense and has purpose and intention.
Because if our home starts working for us with ease then we don't have to get so frustrated and overwhelmed. And by decluttering because you're setting it up in that way, that works best for you. That really eliminates the excess in your house. It adds to getting that end result that you want. And that end result is, you want a place for your kids to do school. That's not at the kitchen table. Or you want a place where you don't have to walk into the back of the couch, when you come in the front door, because it just didn't make sense to have the living room that way. Whatever it may be, visualize it. Figure out how to set it up in a way that makes sense and then set it up that way.
Here's a couple more practical tips for the actual organizing part. After you declutter and you have your favorites, I love buckets and labels. The label maker is something new in my life. And I'm so embarrassed to say that I recently just purchased it. And within recently, I mean, like in the past two weeks, I've never done labels before and I freaking love it.
I love knowing what's in all my buckets. Which bucket is the medicines and which one's the first aid, and all of that stuff. I love knowing which DVD's are in each of my DVD boxes because they're labeled and I've never labeled it before. A label maker, if you're kind of like me, and you want to know what's in things and you're not using clear buckets definitely helps. And they're super cheap too. I just got the cheapest one I could find at Target. It was like $17. And I love it so much. It's made my life so much easier. So that's definitely a worthy investment.
Setting up your space in these ways and your environment in these ways makes life easier. And when life is easier than we could enjoy it more and we have more time to do other things, because organizing and putting things away becomes easier.
Now let's talk about some tips on what not to do when you're organizing your home. The first thing, let's say you're going to organize your linen closet because I did just do this recently too. Don't just look at your linen closet and buy a bunch of pretty buckets from Target, slap those little labels on it that I was just talking about and walk away. Because that does nothing. First of all, you didn't go through everything in your linen closet to decide if you even needed it all. You didn't figure out if you needed to even organize it. You didn't look at your linen closet and decide, how do you want to use this space? Maybe it's not just for linens. Maybe you want to put your extra toilet paper in it. We all know that we have extra toilet paper, right? Maybe you want to put the paper towels in it. Maybe you want to put extra blankets for your guests in it. Maybe you want to put the kids' backpacks in it. Maybe you need to use the top shelf for a medicine cabinet.
I know in my linen closet, I also have a wrapping paper box in there. So I have wrapping paper and tissue paper and different birthday cards and stuff, because I didn't really know where else to put it. So I just kind of designated a little birthday section. Don't just go get a bunch of pretty containers and slap some labels on it and call it organized. That doesn't really help in the process of setting up your home for purposeful, intentional living. It's just organizing your clutter. So declutter first, then get the pretty buckets. And also, before you get the pretty buckets, I would encourage you to go through the rest of your house and your garage and see what you have. So before you go buy anything new, look at what you have first. Because we so quickly want to rush to the store to be like, I'm getting my life in order and I'm going to go get this. And this is going to help. And this is going to change my life.
But we never actually look at what we already have. Maybe you already have some buckets in another closet and you're not using them. And now you could use them in this one. Do that, even though it's not the most fun because we all know we want to make a quick Target trip and get those pretty buckets and slap those labels on. Declutter first! That is my best tip on what to do and what not to do, is declutter. And it falls into both categories. If you need help setting up systems and figuring out the four step process to organizing, make sure to get the FREE GUIDE. You can download Essential Home Systems HERE and it'll walk you through the four step process of creating home systems. If you want my method of how to declutter and all of that good stuff, such as decluttering tips, what to do and what not to do when are decluttering make sure to check out Episode 007.
And now the hardest part is just going and doing. You have to take action on this stuff. When you organize your home, it just gives you so much more time back in your life. Everything has a place. And when you're doing your other routines and your other systems, it's just so much easier. When I do my nightly pickup, I can do it so quickly because my home's organized and I know where everything goes. And one of the tips that I also want to add to the, What not to do category is, don't over organize your stuff. An example of this is in my daughter's room. I had one of those craft carts, but it was super cute. It had pink drawers and everything. And I just loved it because it was the blush pink that matched her room. And I thought, okay, I'm going to put her blocks in the top drawer. In the second drawer, I'm going to put her Barbie clothes. In the third drawer I'm going to put her puzzles.
The fourth drawer I'm going to put all the little figurines that she likes to play with. The fifth drawer will be for books and yada, yada, you get the point, right? So I had all the drawers, sectioned out. Okay, my daughter is three. She's not doing that. You know what we're doing? We're picking all the crap up off the floor and we're throwing it in the basket and we're putting it in the corner of her room. And that is done. Because to me, when I set up my home and organize my home in a life giving way, I want to know that I can walk into any room of my house, that it can be picked up in five minutes. And that includes my daughter's room. So if I have to sit there and sort through her toys and put them all in the different little drawers of that craft cart, it was taking so long because then I was organizing toys. When really just toys in general in a basket was organized enough because they were off the floor.
Don't overcomplicate it. Because that does not help when it comes to setting up our home with intention and purpose. You need to set the intent in the room and in this space and really visualize that end result you want, which is, I want to be able to pick up any room in the house in under five minutes. Then figure out systems to make that happen. So the system for that is, first of all, we have to have way less toys because if it takes 20 minutes, then we have too much stuff. Five minutes worth of toys and clothes and pillows and blankets, that's enough. And if it takes longer than that, then I know it's time to declutter more because that's how I visualize cleaning her room. Also when I have to sit there and micro sort all the toys, that doesn't work for me. So that's a huge what not to do because even though it's organized, it's too organized and it's taking up too much time and it's too hard to do.
And I'm all about ease and elegance. So even though the organizational system was super cute and it matched and I loved it when I bought it. I should have known better then. We don't organize toys because that's just one of my things. I just want to be able to throw everything in a bucket and clean each room in five minutes or less. That's kind of going back to setting up your home with intent and purpose. Now go and do. Pick a space in your house. Figure out what area you want to organize. If you want to start with the kitchen, go for it, look at everything, pull everything out, declutter it. Pick your favorites and put things where you intuitively think they should go. The coffee cups should go above the coffee maker. Baking dishes should go by the stove. Pots and pan should go by the stove, not on the other side of the kitchen.
Just kind of think through where each thing should go and organize it based on that. And I'm also going to take a few pictures of the linen closet that I just did. I just organized it this week before I did this episode and it'll show you how some things are in buckets with labels and other things are not. Some things are in there that are not just linens even though its on linen closet, but that's okay. Because for me, in my home, the purpose is that that stuff has a place and I don't have a wrapping paper closet. And I don't want to put it in my closet and it sure as heck cannot go in my kid's closet. So it's going to go on the top shelf in the linen closet.
Now it's your turn to go and do. Pick an area of your home and organize it with intention. Look at your home for what it is and make sure that the way things are set up, are set up with intention. So that way you can live life with the purpose that you're trying to accomplish.
Until next time, I'm Ashley Brown and I'm always cheering for you.
The episode is over and now it's time for you to take action.
What can you do today that will help you create who you want to be? Little by little progress adds up and in turn makes a big impact.
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You have the power to create who you were made to be. You can move past the chaos and start living a life you love with ease. And remember, I'll be there cheering you on.
Until next time. I'm Ashley Brown.
