Creatively Organized Spaces
Spring fever and the extra hour of daylight spur many of us onto spring cleaning, especially right now while we are spending more time at home! We are still in the height of Spring Cleaning frenzy so if you haven’t yet tackled the closets, there’s still plenty of time before the heat of the summer and seasonal vacations and kids summer breaks are upon us!
This time of year is a great time to deep clean the kitchen and fridge, especially after summer and fall trips to the farmers market and before all your holiday cooking, baking, and entertaining. This year, it’s especially important to keep our homes and kitchens cleaner than ever! BUT, if you are reading this in the Spring or before Back to School…any time is a good time to take a deep dive for your cleanest kitchen. I recommend it at least a couple of times a year.
You can take each step above and break it down over a weekend or a whole week (7 steps-7 days!) depending on how much time you have. As I do this, I pull things out and try to use up leftovers (especially in the freezer) to make room for all the great new food I’ll be preparing and eating over the holiday season.
If you ever question keeping or tossing, HERE is a great list of food expiration, etc. follows. Safety and common sense should prevail…BUT I will say that in the age of “toss it” mentality there are probably lots of things you-should-never-have-bought AND may not need to go but I’ll bet some are on this list. Use your judgment, and follow your intuition…and FYI-Sugar never expires!
Happy pre-holiday cleaning!
Do you have a disaster plan? Wondering if you really need a home inventory? Whether you have one started or have nothing at all read on to learn why you need a home inventory and how to protect your personal property.
Almost all of us need a home inventory, whether we are renting or own your homes or businesses. If you have insurance, you need an inventory to prove replacement value. Sadly, a lot of people think that because they have insurance they don’t need to worry about a home inventory. But unfortunately, that’s not true, having insurance doesn’t’ guarantee you will get replacement value for your property. There are so many irreplaceable things and all the little stuff really adds up. Having a home inventory will save you a huge potential headache, hours of time, or worse out of pocket expenses lost down the drain. When you’re trying to dig your way out of a disaster, that added stress is the last thing you need. 
When I became a professional organizer, I learned all about the different home inventory systems and tools available. I also helped clients with creating inventory systems both before and after disasters, mostly flooding, some theft. Trust me when I say, you don’t want to have to inventory your stuff after it’s been damaged or try to remember what’s missing! It’s not the insurance companies responsibility to take your word for all your personal belongings, and it’s not in their interest to help you with this. If you can’t prove you owned it (meaning tracking down receipts or charges, photo’s or other documentation) you may lose altogether.
What needs to be inventoried? The quick answer is everything! You are probably thinking this will take ages and depending on how much detail you want to include, it could be a significant undertaking but really not so bad if you take it step-by-step and room-by-room.
Without an inventory, you could end up with a mess on your hands and thousands of dollars in lost assets! Don’t get stuck sorting toilet plungers from kitchen utensils, holiday decor, and more. Document what you’ve got and what would need to be replaced.
I’ve worked extensively on creating inventory for insurance claims. Here’s what you need to know. Photos are your friends! Spreadsheets are super helpful and may prevent you from having to fill out additional information in the event of an insurance claim. But there are other systems out there that are super helpful and can do more for you than just a home inventory.
As the well known Sheryl Sandberg quote goes “Done is better than perfect.” So true in the case of an inventory! Just having photo’s is better than nothing!
A home inventory Checklist can help you to understand what information will be most valuable in the case of an insurance claim. Most insurance companies would like to have the following. The more info you can provide, the more accurate your claim and reimbursement will be. Remember, the more complicated your assets and estate, the more details you will need.
It may not be necessary to have all the information below. If you’re in a disaster situation and realize you don’t have anything, the short answer is to photograph every wall of every room, even opening cabinets, closets, and taking photos of contents by shelf. Take notes on contents to help jog your memory, noting location and a general description. Photograph anything specifically valuable in each room. These photos and notes will prove invaluable if you have to evacuate quickly and end up losing property.
Remember, “Done is better than perfect!” What follows is a more detailed guide of what your insurance company might request. Not having all of this does not mean you will not get reimbursed. The more you can provide, the quicker and more smoothly things will move along.
Home Zada is one of the most comprehensive home management tools out there and does everything from home maintenance reminders to home inventory. If you’re on the serious side of protecting your valuable assets, I can’t recommend a better way to manage it all in one place! This is a cloud-based option so you won’t lose it if you lose your computer!
Another great comprehensive but inexpensive system is Liberty Street Home Manage software (also cloud-based). It’s under $40 and allows you to enter all the important documentation and photo’s for all your assets (at multiple locations).
Several insurance companies have their own systems, so ask your insurance agent what they offer! It will probably be free and give them everything needed if you ever had to make a claim.
Home Contents is a UK Based app that makes home inventory a snap with your digital camera in-phone. And finally, in the app department, My Stuff has several free and paid options with great features for adding items to folders, tagging, etc for easier sorting and organizing.
If you prefer to stick with a spreadsheet-style inventory, just do a quick search for Home Inventory Checklist to find quite a few good options available for free. Most of these are templates that you can download and use on your computer/device.
Spreadsheet systems (I’ve used comprehensively with insurance agents to recover contents lost) can be clunky and it’s difficult to quickly see photos of items with their description. Another drawback is that unless you backup your computer or device, you run the risk of losing your inventory (photo’s and checklist) along with your contents in case of a disaster!
If a home inventory is something you want help setting up, let me know and I’d be glad to assist!
No matter what system you choose, I hope you will make a plan, schedule it on your calendar and start your home inventory today!
More than once, I’ve walked into clients who were nearly in tears or having a meltdown over their kid’s rooms and stuff everywhere. This can be utterly frustrating, especially with most of us at home, almost all the time right now, living, working, eating, schooling together! Kids and their stuff, their messy rooms, and their over-bulging closets and drawers filled with way more clothes than needed can create the perfect storm for overwhelm and overreacting. Sadly what can often happen is parents beat themselves up, thinking “this is my fault, I let them have all these things and I don’t have the time and energy to manage it all!” No, No, No, it’s not all your fault!
I’m thrilled to work with parents who want to model and teach their kids how to manage the stuff overload. This is not just a problem for parents and kids, it’s something we all are dealing with to some degree or another.
Today, we will tackle one category of stuff that tends to make a lot of work for all of us, our clothes! There are strategies for parents and kids to help make it easier to choose what to wear. A kids capsule wardrobe can help reduce decision fatigue, save money, and the time it takes to get ready in the morning.
Here’s a step by step plan which works best when you can involve your kids, even the little one’s can have a strong opinion about the process!
Start with clean laundry that’s been sorted, and purged in each kid’s room which will give you a wardrobe to “Shop” from. The process isn’t that different than any other organizing one, where donations, trash, and items to keep are sorted into categories. The main thing to do differently is to create a simple and easy kids wardrobe for them to look through and purge further. Count how many items in each category of clothing they have and established some guidelines for what seems reasonable for them to pick their favorites from.
Create a Kids Capsule Wardrobe in 5 easy steps:
1. Clean all the clothes and gather in one place.
2. Sort and eliminate any that are not in good shape, don’t fit, or are impractical.
3. Look at the overall colors, styles your kids gravitate towards, and start gathering them into categories eliminating duplicates and oddballs that don’t fit with the scheme.
4. Put clothes away, hanging, and folding. You might want to try the Kon-Marie method of folding (Tee-shirt video here) or use a folding board. Arranged by category (shirts, pants, shorts, etc) and color to make it easier to mix and match outfits.
To make this work you may need to fill in some pieces if you find wardrobe gaps. Now you have the makings for a funky, fun, and easy mix and match wardrobe system! This could be a great way to simplify your kid’s wardrobe and from there, the closet’s and clothes storage might be a little easier!
Here is a general idea of what categories you might find helpful and how many of each item seems appropriate, some of these might differ for your kids:
If your kids go to a private school or wear uniforms, that will be a separate category but manage the number of each style needed. They may also be very involved in sports and have a lot of gear, so count that as another category and keep the number of items per sport manageable.
These guidelines should help you create a basic and easy kids capsule wardrobe. These categories and quantities are a starting point for you and your kids if you think it’s still too much then whittle it down further. Less is more when it comes to maintaining an easy kids wardrobe, especially when kids grow quickly and tend to need things replaced more frequently than adults. Have fun and maybe this will inspire you to create a capsule wardrobe of your own!
Does paperwork pile up around you at home and in the office? Piles of Paper everywhere and no system in sight…unopened mail, junk mail littering all your horizontal surfaces. There can be so many reasons that paperwork piles up but getting through your paper piles can be either overwhelming or totally rewarding! Today I share the first easy step you can take to Purge the Paper Piles in your home or office.
A lot of organizers recommend gathering everything together first, but we are going to do this a little differently. Before you gather all the Piles of Paperwork it can be helpful to identify why and how you got to your current state of overwhelm. I don’t have all those answers for your situation but I can make some educated guesses based upon my observations with clients, friends and family.
We all have our breaking points and for some of us there are more urgent things in life than dealing with a paper piles that seem so unimportant! We push them aside, figure we will have time later and we make a lot of excuses for not getting around to it, day after day, week after week and sometimes for years. When you get to this point, it’s certainly easy to understand why we are overwhelmed and don’t where to begin.
What do I mean? Instead of feeling like you need to go back through everything in the past to get started, start where you are. In my experience if you lost every single piece of paper in your house in a fire or other tragedy, there is very little paperwork that can’t be replaced. I’m not saying it’s something you want to happen just that so much of what we need to keep can be replaced with a few phone calls and emails.
First (before gathering everything in your home/office), sit down and open only your most current paper pile of mail, receipts etc (today or this week’s). Think about what you have coming in. What categories do they fit in? Here are some general and sub categories.
Next, list of YOUR categories, don’t think about what you had in the past or what you “think you should have”…just start simple. As you go through what you have, consider going paperless with utilities and bank statements or anything you can easily access online. You may still need one general category for all utilities (to keep track of account numbers etc). By simplifying your incoming mail and what needs to be filed you will create a system that’s easier to maintain.
Before you get into purging past piles of paperwork, create a “Staging” area for this project and gather your supplies:
The next step, pick up and sort through a pile to see how it fits into this new simple system. Depending on how long this first step took, you can estimate how much time you will need to sort and purge all your Paper Piles! If you don’t have a good system for your mail when it comes in the house, check out this post on Creating a Practical Command Center.
*Some people may prefer a flat filing system like the drawers below or binders, but for the purpose of purging I will focus on file boxes of some sort.
