A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

Organization and Order is a way to start Spring off right.

That is what I promised to talk about, getting organized. There are three places I am going to talk about, but we can approach any space the same way. The garage: I have been in some garages that even the homeowner couldn’t find things if they wanted to. The Shed: It can be even more important because of its size, often not very big, and the smaller it is the harder it is to keep organized, it seems. The yard itself: This is not as hard to get organized in the spring because most of the stuff is in the garage and hasn’t been put out yet, but unless you watch it doesn’t take long and it is full and not of the things that you want there either.

My approach is to get the yard ready first. Clean the flower bed and deck and anything else that needs it, fence, arbor, play sets, etc. I might talk about cleaning another time.

Next I would start with the Garage. We can now get out of the garage what is going to spend the summer in the yard. If we do this right we will be organizing the yard as we go by putting things where we want them. This can be reorganized later if we want to change things. The next step with the garage is to get everything else that does not have a home out of the garage onto the drive way. I hope you have given yourselves enough time for this step because before the day is done it all will need to be put away. To help with the organization of tools and stuff (we don’t always know what stuff is but we certainly have a lot of it) we can put pegboard up on a wall or walls or buy some sort of smart space organizer in order to give everything a place. These organizer helps are the key to really achieving your goal. An old dresser can sometimes be used to give drawer space. Drawers can be poor though as they seem to just hide what you want in the bottom every time. As we put things back in the garage things should always go where we can find them again. Sometime this might mean we need to use some labeling. Yes my memory is short and getting shorter every day so I need a reminder of where I put things and where they should be returned to.

After we have the garage back together we need to have the same approach with the shed as we had with the garage. This isn’t as big a job, as it is usually smaller but as I said earlier that means it is even more important for things to have their own space in order for the shed not to be cluttered and so we can find things when we need them.

Here are the steps again. 1. Make it empty. 2. Clean it up. 3. Use things to help you organize. 4. Put everything in its space.

Not least of all don’t forget to have fun as you get things organized as you will thank yourself all summer long.

Continually developing “ideas for living”

Be Sociable, Share!

•