Organize and Decorate Too
Tags: declutter , decluttering , clutter , organizing , home organization , style , ,
Have you ever looked at photos of "organized" homes in books which look amazingly empty and thought "Who would ever want to live in a boring house like that!"
But an organized home doesn't have to be bare. Home organization doesn't dictate a specific look. Decluttering your home means disposing of all the junk which you don’t need, don’t want and don’t like. You keep the things you love, use and need. Organizing your home means being able to simply and quickly find the posessions you’ve decided to keep every time you want them. Neither says anything about how your home has to look – so you can make your decluttered and organized house look just as stylish and beautiful as you wish.
Storage doesn't have to be behind closed doors, although you probably want a fair amount to be so. It’s a fine idea to combine open and closed shelving so that you can contrast a visually uncluttered area of closed storage (hiding the needed but possibly ugly objects) with a more exciting visual feast of open display.
If you’re someone who likes to see lots of things on display, that’s fine too. Just be aware of how things look when you get them, even very everyday objects like food packets. If you have the choice, buy things which are decorative and even color-matched as well as useful.
Even a very random mix of ordinary objects can look more organized if you create order by the way you store them. Matching open shelf units which cover a large area, especially if the shelving itself is assertive in color or design, can impose an ordered grid on the contents. The tighter the shelving grid, the more ordered it will look. Repeating the shelving style within the same space, or throughout the home, gives a more ordered look.
One important element is to include display space for things you love to admire. These can be displayed in collections, or singly with space around them so that each individual object stands out as something unique. Rotating objects to be displayed helps to make each one more special, too: you never get so used to seeing it that you become blind to it.
While we want to see the posessions we love, there are other objects we don’t want to have on display and which only make a space look cluttered. Some of the worst problems here are power and data cords, in their many variations. If you’re redesigning a space completely, it 's a fine idea to design in concealment from the beginning – for example, you could use hollow baseboard systems which act as wiring containers all around the room, as well as many other methods which will work. If you’re just redecorating an existing space, take every opportunity to hide cords inside furniture and use cable organizers to corral the spaghetti of cables around most computer systems. Try to keep power and data cables apart, as the fields around power cables can interfere with data.
A good way of checking how you’re getting on is to take photos of the room. Our eyes and brains are amazingly good at “editing out” mess we don’t want to see, but a picture shows every detail of how things really appear. Keep organizing and checking with pictures until your room looks how you want it to – then take a well-earned break and relax in your organized AND decorated space!
About the Author
Author: robing99 | Total views: 89
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Robin Gray sponsors local organizing workshops in British Columbia, Canada and muses on organization and decluttering at Declutter First!, the decluttering and home organization site.
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