What are some of the tools and supplies you need to get organized? Having a "home" for all your stuff is crucial to keeping your house organized. Shelves and dividers help you maximize the storage space in your home. Label makers help you and your family learn where everything goes and put things back where they belong.
When asked about what some of the tools and supplies are that you need to get organized Lorie Marrero, who is the owner of "LivingOrder", a professional organization company that creates organizing solutions for homes and businesses, replies, "It depends. For the kitchen, a drawer divider is one of the best tools you can have. Everybody has probably seen the little silverware dividers that you can buy at Wal-Mart, but there are other drawer dividers that are useful for utensils and all your kitchen gadgets. Another thing that we use is "helper" shelves. These are little risers that you use to maximize the vertical space being wasted on a shelf if it's not adjustable. Let's just say you have a shelf that's two feet apart from the next shelf up and you've only got a short little thing sitting on the shelf. There is all that wasted space in between, so the helper shelf just stands up or four legs and sits on the shelf. It can basically add another shelf." Some other things that help when organizing a kitchen are: "Pot racks because they create space in your cabinets. And there's a great product called Lid Maid that is sold at the Container Store. It's a way to manage the lids for pots and pans. It just holds them up vertically and you can slide it in and out of the cabinet. A label maker is one of the most important tools you can have in a house for any room. Some people laugh and call us the 'Label Nazis' because we label everything. It is funny at first, but that's really how people know where to put things. As long as you don't go crazy and start putting labels on your children's foreheads, it's very effective, especially when people are sharing a space, and even if you're not. You can see that this is where the chips go or this is where the spices go and things like that. Our favorite is the handheld Brother P-Touch labelers that you can get at Office Depot."
Like Lorie mentioned, different rooms require different tolls and supplies that you need in order to get them organized. For dining rooms this could entail a china hutch or side table to store all of your serving pieces and a place to hold any extra linen you may possess. In a living room, this could be a media cabinet or entertainment center as well as bookshelves, end tables and shelves for any assortment of personal pieces that you want to showcase. When it comes to storage, it is especially important to think of not only what you own at present, but how much room you will need for your growing collections in the future. Collectables, CD's, DVD's and such tend to accumulate and you need to be prepared to store them as they come into the house.
Another thing you need to take into consideration is how you are going to accomplish the organization. Are you having a professional come in to design and install built-ins or do you want to build them yourself? Are you going to shop around and study to learn what the best options are for your lifestyle, space and things? Or are you going to hire someone like Lorie, an expert organizer to come in and take care of all those details for you? In the end, it all comes down to if the time saved will be worth the extra money.
