When you walk into your apartment, does the atmosphere feel welcoming and homey? Or do you leave the outdoor stresses behind and exchange them for a cluttered apartment?
Your home should be a place where you feel safe and peaceful. But even the best interior decor and comfy furnishings can’t make an apartment cozy if it’s disorganized.
The good news is that this is an easy fix! With the help of a top rated professional organizer, you can turn your apartment into a place you love relaxing in. These seven tips will take each room from disarray into organized, and keep it that way!
Table of Contents
1. Start With the Countertops
When you see a lot of clutter, it’s often enough to send your brain into defeat mode. It makes the job feel impossible and you give up before you start.
The flip side of this is that when your countertops are free of visual clutter, you feel peaceful and ready to tackle the rest of the house. It’s a trick of the brain either way. If you conquer it and use it right, this simple action sets you up for the successful organizing of your whole apartment!
Starting with the first room you want to organize, clear each flat surface. Don’t dump everything into drawers. Instead, carry a basket and put all the clutter you find into it until you’re ready to sort through it.
Once the counters are clear, clean them with an all-purpose cleaner. Then you can put your storage containers on the surface and begin to return items to their rightful, newly organized place.
2. Move to the Drawers
Since you already have a basket full of stuff you don’t know what to do with yet, it’s time to dump out your drawers. One room at a time, empty the drawers that have collected clutter.
Look at each thing you’ve uncovered. Ask yourself if you really need it. Have you used it in the past year? Can you easily replace it if necessary? Is it junk?
Make a conscious decision to keep the necessities and get rid of the rest. Holding onto things that are useful is one thing; hoarding is another.
When you’re down to only what you really want to keep, decide where the best place to store each thing is. Use drawer organizers to manage your miscellaneous items instead of returning everything willy-nilly back to the cleared space.
3. Minimize Your Bedroom
Most of us spend the majority of our time in our bedrooms. This makes them the perfect place for all our extra possessions. It sounds like no big deal, but a cluttered bedroom can be bad for your mental and physical health.
Messy rooms make it hard for your brain to turn off at night, and could be causing you to toss and turn. Experts suggest making sure the area around you is clear of clutter if you want to get a good night’s sleep.
To do this, keep your nightstand free of all but the basics. Your cell phone charger, a lamp, and a bottle of water are okay, but anything beyond that needs to find a new home.
Limit the artwork in your room, too. You want to make it personalized, but remember, your brain is processing everything in your line of vision. Even if it’s your favorite collection, it’s going to be stimulating. In your bedroom, less is best.
4. Don’t Have “Too Much” Space
An extra room sounds great in theory. It’ll be your office! Your man/woman-cave! A spare bedroom!
In reality, extra space can be dangerously addicting to your clutter tendencies. Make sure your apartment matches your lifestyle. If you have too much space and it’s causing you to be disorganized, it might be time to downsize.
This is why a lot of homeowners tend to switch to renting once their children move out. A smaller apartment is easier to take care of than a big house.
5. Use Your Vertical Space
Big empty walls are a waste of perfectly good organization areas. That blank area can also cause you to walk into a room and feel slightly off, but not know why.
Instead of filling up your living room wall with random pieces of art, why not use it to get organized? Add some shelves or invest in a tall bookshelf.
In the kitchen, the empty space can be used to hang your pots and pans or utensils. The bathroom wall is the perfect spot for a shelf that holds your hand towels, toiletries, and a small indoor plant.
Maximize the vertical space in your home by using it to boost your storage systems.
6. Add Extra Storage in the Kitchen
Apartments frequently have small kitchens, but you can expand the room you do have with extra storage pieces.
A lazy susan in a hard-to-reach cupboard lets you use it instead of tucking away rarely used items. Refrigerator organizers store oddly shaped foods like fruits and veggies or canned goods without making a mess.
If you don’t have a big pantry, an over-the-door organizer might solve the problem of where to put your Ziplocs and tin foil.
7. Go Digital
A big problem of disorganization stems from too many cords and too much “stuff.” Since we live in a world where so much is digital, a lot of these issues can be taken care of.
If you have streaming services, do you really need that DVD/VCR/Blu-ray player? If so, use cord covers to keep them from tangling up with each other.
Those sentimental things that you keep for the memories could easily be donated to someone else who’d cherish them. You can hold the memory in a picture instead.
Too many picture frames? Hook your phone or computer up to your TV or a digital frame. Hundreds of images can be shared one print at a time, all in one location!
Going digital is an easy way to get rid of clutter and organize your home.
Conclusion
Getting your apartment organized doesn’t have to be a chore itself! In fact, once you get a handle on the clutter and mess, you’ll find yourself relaxing with less clean-up to do each day.
