Solution to Organize your Home: skill sets and cycles

How do you go from chaotic to controlled, cluttered to clean on the home front?

Learn four simple skill sets, and apply them to the cycles of home keeping. In this book, we’ll start with the basic skills needed to declutter, organize, clean, and plan a well-run home. Then we’ll apply these skills to the cycles of life in every home: food, clothing, surroundings, paper, and finances.

Part One: Skills for a Well-run Home

In high school home economics classes, I learned to make bound buttonholes, set a pretty table, and bake a dozen cookies that were all the same size—but I wasn’t taught the real skills needed to create a clean and organized home. How to keep clutter under control. How to organize and clean house. How to plan my time and family activities.

Decluttering your home At bottom, the problem isn’t about “stuff;” it’s about the habits, personality traits,

and thought processes that encourage the build-up of clutter.

In the declutter skill set, we learn a 20-minute method to banish clutter anywhere. We gain a deeper understanding of personality traits that encourage cluttering, and explore ways to fight the thought processes that tie us to our stuff. Finally, we share tips to deal with other people’s clutter.

Organizing your home A well-organized home makes life flow smoothly, speeds cleaning, and means you’ll never have to look for misplaced items again … well, most of the time.

In the organize skill set, we focus on the three basic rules of home organization. We establish a place for everything, bring the family on board, and create activity centers to focus space and possessions. Finally, we look for storage solutions to contain clutter and make living spaces work.

Cleaning your home It’s not how long you clean. It’s not how hard you clean. It’s how efficiently you clean that makes the difference between grimy and gleaming.

In the clean skill set, we cover the basics of speed cleaning—cleaners, tools, and methods. We find out how to clean the way the pros do, fast and well. We stress teamwork, explore ways to bring children onboard, and share cleaning tips to get the family out the door and on to better things.

Planning your home It’s an old saying: if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Planning daily routines, housework schedules, and family activities is key to smooth sailing at home.

In the plan skill set, we explore the secrets of checklists, calendars, schedules and to-do lists. We share timesaving tips and point out time-traps to avoid. Finally, we discover the organized family’s power tool: the Household Notebook.

Part Two: Cycles of an Organized Home 

Around the house, the calendar turns—and so do the basicvcycles of home life. Food and cooking. Clothing care. Dealingvwith clutter, cleaning, and organizing. Paper handling and billvpaying. In Part Two, we apply our newfound skill sets to eachvof these major cycles.

Food In this first section, we tackle all aspects of food: menu and meal planning, grocery shopping, and food storage. We declutter, organize, and clean the kitchen, setting up activity centers to make it easy and quick to get the family fed. We also tackle bottom-dollar issues of energy efficiency, kitchen appliances, and setting up a pantry.

Clothing Section Two takes us into closets, dressers. and drawers as we organize all aspects of keeping ourselves clothed. We plan wardrobes, declutter, and organize the clothes closet, clean out clothing clutter, manage seasonal storage, and learn the best ways to launder and care for our clothing investment.

Surfaces and systems In Section Three, our surroundings start to shine. Here, we learn to care for walls, windows, floors, and furnishings, maintain bedding and mattresses, and get acquainted with household systems that keep us comfortable and safe. We focus on home safety and energy savings, too, as we make home a clean and comfortable place to be.

Room to live Section Four offers room-by-room help for clutter, cleaning, and organization issues. Whether it’s the family room, children’s areas, bedroom, or bath, we cut the clutter, get organized, and clean up quickly and well.

Paper and finances Section Five tackles the paper chase: sorting, organizing, and filing the paper in our lives. We learn which documents to keep, how to keep them, and create centers for efficient bill paying, deskwork, and paper handling.