Trish Braunersrither interviews Tracy about Getting Your Home Organized. Where do you even start?
Definition of Organizing
Organizing is…. knowing what you have and knowing where to find it when you need it.
So how do you get there? To organize your home, you can follow the acronym:
SPASM to Organize Your Home
Sort
Not making decisions about whether we want to keep something or not, but putting it into piles or categories. For example, when you go into your closet, you don’t decide if you want to keep an item or not, you pull out all the tank tops and put them in a pile on your bed. Pull out all the bottoms – jeans, slacks, leggings, skirts, etc. And continue this until everything is out of the closet (or the one area that you’re going through). Then, go to the next step.
Purge
Focus on one pile or category and decide which pieces you want to keep and which ones you can get rid of. For example, if you’re looking at your pile of tank tops, you pick up your favorite tops, hang or fold them up, and then look at the ones left over. Decide first, how many you think you need in your closet. Then look at which ones you wear and the ones you haven’t worn. It’s okay to let go of them. It’s okay to get rid of something you haven’t worn in the last 6 months to a year if you’re thinking, “One day I might be able to wear this.” You will have enough clothes to wear when you need them. If you lose that 25 pounds someday, you can treat yourself to a new, smaller tank top. But for now, you can release it.
Decision-making is a skill.
Getting rid of things is sometimes hard because you’re “emotionally attached” to them. For example, “I wore this tank top the very last time I saw my mom before she died.” You can decide to keep it, if you want to remember that special day, but you can also remember that you have a picture of you and your mom from that day, so that picture could be the item that you keep to remember that special day and allow yourself to purge the tank top. It’s all up to you. You get to decide how to organize your home. It IS your home.
Assign Homes – Put things you use a lot in an easily accessible place when you organize your home. Decide where things are going to live. For now, they are going to live here. Down the road, you can change the place where each item lives. Try things to see what works for you.
Labeling the assigned spot helps. It especially helps your family members. They know where each item lives and they know where you want it. You also get reminders when you’re putting things away in case you forget. For example, the kid’s snacks live where the label says, “Kid’s Snacks.” When you come home from the grocery store, the kids can help put the snacks away into “kid’s snacks.” Then, when they are making their lunch in the morning, they know exactly where to go find the snacks to add to their lunchbox.
The Interview
You can listen to the full interview here:
Set Limits
Now, you know what you have and you know where it’s going to live. At this step, you get to look at the space where an item lives and set limits or contain it. In the kitchen drawer, maybe you want to contain categories by adding drawer dividers.
Always shop your home first. Do you already own drawer dividers that would work? Think about what you already have and use that. If you don’t have anything to use for drawer dividers, THEN measure exactly what you need and purchase them.
Once the containers – baskets, drawers, drawer dividers, shelves, shelf dividers, boxes or containers – is full, that is your limit. For example, think of your sock drawer. After sorting, picking your favorites, purging the ones that have holes or the ones you never wear, put only the ‘chosen’ socks back in the drawer. As the weeks go by and you get more socks and the drawer starts to be stuffed and overflowing, you know that it’s at its limit. You need to go through that drawer again to sort and purge. Your space has a limit.
Maintain
To maintain your spaces, tie the task to something you already do. For example, I tie cleaning out the refrigerator each week to trash day. I clean out all the old food the night before and take the trash out to the curb. Then I wipe down the inside shelves of the refrigerator. See how we tied this to something that already happens each week?
Another example is a season or time period. In August, we go through all the kids’ clothes and decide what items they need for the new school year. We sort, purge, and then set the limits… What do they still need? Where will each category live?
So those are the basics to organize your home. For every space, you can use the SPASM technique.
- The top of your dresser
- Your pantry
- The junk drawer
- The dreaded entryway closet
- Your clothing
For each week on the calendar, you can write one small area of your home to organize and clean. If organizing a space is going to be a bigger project to tackle, you can schedule a longer time or break it up into 15 minutes a day until it’s completed.
If you’d like help, I’ve developed a program called Organized Life Academy where we go through each area of your house together. Imagine feeling calm and confident in your home instead of overwhelmed and stuck. Learn the exact steps, where to start, and how to stay motivated. Plus TRANSFORM your mindset with the tools I’m about to teach you!
I’d love to see you there and help you get your home organized.
Join Trish on her podcast ‘Wisdom with Trish‘ as she delves into the journey of breaking free from societal pressures of diet culture and finding guidance through faith in God. She explores the principles of the Word of Wisdom and how to trust in a higher power for guidance on body image and self-care. Tune in for enlightening conversations and a renewed perspective on body positivity.
You can also follow Trish on Instagram at @wisdomwithtrish.
