Home Guide

Easy Ways to Perfectly Organize Your Home

Upgrade your space

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Admit it: even if you love your house, there are some areas that could use tweaking. Here are some organizational suggestions to help turn your existing home into your dream home.

Contain Yourself
If your closet is overflowing with rogue shoes and belts, you can’t open your bathroom cabinet without bottles falling all over the place and you haven’t baked in years because you can’t find the cinammon amongst the endless dusty bottles of what used to be spices, you need some order in your life. Get it at The Container Store, which sells, you guessed it: containers. Containers of every shape and size. Containers for that messy bag of flour. Containers to hold those cotton balls that are always falling out of the bag. Specially made tie hangers, belt hangers, boot hangers. In-closet organizational systems. For the Type A among us, it’s Heaven. In fact, it’s giving us anxiety right now just thinking about how much your house needs organizing. Help us. Go there. Garden City Center, 150 Hillside Road, Cranston. 868-4140, containerstore.com

Have Your People Call Martha’s People
Ok, ok. Some people have the organization gene, and some don’t. (You know who you are. You’ve got a pile of untouched bins in the garage just waiting to be filled.) Don’t judge yourself. We can’t all be Martha Stewart – just ask Martha herself. If you’re craving order in your home but just can’t make it happen, it’s time to call in some professional help. Jemison Faust of Your Choice Organizing will help you set up simple, workable systems in your home, creating peace of mind, endless free time and domestic bliss... or just a really well-organized pantry. 6 Bush Street, Newport. 846-8426, yourchoiceorganizing.com 

Channel Your Inner Candy Spelling
Sure, the uber-rich widow of TV titan Aaron Spelling had it all. But her version of having it all included being hyper-organized, down to having two dedicated gift wrapping rooms in the enormous mansion she shared with her late husband: one for decorating gifts, and one for wrapping large parcels for mailing. You might not have the space or the desperate need to fill your hours that Candy had, but you can take a page from her book by turning a corner or a closet into a dedicated gift wrapping station. Here’s how: invest in those removable, stickable hooks and lightweight dowels long enough to hold rolls of wrapping paper. Stick two hooks to the wall wide enough apart to hold a roll, put one on a dowel and hang the dowel. Repeat until you run out of wall or wrapping paper. Dedicate one dowel to spools of ribbon, and put up a couple of removable file bins somewhere close by to hold gift bags, tissue paper and cards. Et voila. Think about how often those rolls of paper fall out of a closet, get dinged and end up in the recycling bin. This is an investment of time that feels very organized, saves you money and is 90210 approved.

Come Out of the (Boring) Closet
Ah, closet space. The white whale of apartment dwellers and owners of historic homes. Chances are, you don’t love your closet as much as you should. And how could you? There’s no good place for shoes. It’s not big enough to hold your extensive tie collection. And you think you have nothing to wear because you can never see any of your clothes when they’re crammed into that dimly lit closet for ants that your landlord thinks is sufficient. Phew. Don’t suffer. For surprisingly little money, you can create the closet of your dreams at Closets, Etc. These custom closet pros specialize in maximizing space and creating organization that works for you and fits everything you need to fit. Whether you throw out your old prom dress... well, that’s up to you. 569 Armistice Boulevard, Pawtucket. 398-0398, closets-etc.com

Cultivate a “Me” Space
You spend most - ok, all - of your time on other people, whether that’s working all day and rushing home to make dinner and do laundry, or shuttling kids back and forth to their endless social appointments (seriously, when did kids become busier than adults?). You probably don’t give yourself the gift of a few dedicated minutes on what you love. Help cultivate balance in your life by creating a space just for you, dedicated to what you love. Do you crave silence with a good book? Set up a chair and end table in a corner of your bedroom, make a pile of a couple of books and magazines you’ve been meaning to read, and keep it cozy with a throw blanket. Visual reminders of the things you love will encourage you to spend more time on them and less time in the car thinking “I wish I had time to finish that book.” If reading isn’t your thing, try one of these: a “wine nook” in the dining room with glasses and a stocked wine fridge; a yoga or free weight area in the living room by the entertainment center (you can just as easily Kardashian-binge from a mat as from your couch); or a DIY area in your garage, stocked with well-organized tools or crafting supplies. The better organized your materials are, the more likely you are to start a project - after all, the first step of gathering everything you need will already be taken care of for you.

the container store, your choice organizing, closets etc, julie tremaine, home organizing, diy, hey rhody, rhode island

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