Organize your living areas
To organize your living areas you need to first
determine what you use your living areas for. Our lounge or living room is used for reading,
watching TV and general play.
Our dinning room at the moment doubles as a place for my husband to work when he works from home as well as our eating spot in the evenings.
In winter we enjoy doing our desk work at our dining room table as we have a fireplace in this room.
Both of these rooms get a lot of sun which causes the readers in this family to seek out a patch of sun to read in!
Hopefully these tips to organize your living areas will help you in making these rooms well suited to your families needs.
Again I stress that nothing will get clean or organized by itself and you will need in some cases sheer determination (or is it desperation)
to get your home organized. But don’t give it...with it comes peace and happiness for all who live there!
The three day blitz!
The three day blitz is best left for holidays. Homeschooling moms do not normally have the time available during school terms.
Day 1
Before you start organizing you need to get rid of the things that don’t belong! Grab a black bag. Pick up and throw away all the rubbish that has collected. Included are newspapers, magazine and catalogues. Those can be given to recycling. Well done, that’s good enough for today!
Day 2
Second day get your children to help. Each of you must turn the room upside down, look under couches, under pillows, go through bookshelves and baskets and get rid of anything that belongs to them or their siblings. Make it a race against a clock, real or imagined. Pile the items up on the floor and then separate them into groups according to whose is whose. Your children will them each take a pile and return those items to their correct place. End of day 2, well done!
Day 3
Give your lounge a thorough clean, wipe down cabinets, vacuum couches and polish wood. Wash any loose covers on your couches. Replace them when dry. Spray your room with some rose water or a bought room spray. Set a vase of flowers in the centre of a table or on top of a cabinet and pat yourself on your back!
Easy tips to organize your living room
Our couches are covered with throws to keep the chairs clean. As we spend a lot of time reading
great books
with our children, we like to give our couches extra protection.
We have large wicker baskets which hold our library books. These books are looked at in the lounge and I encourage our children not to take them walk-about! This saves time when we need to return the books to the library.
Our current read alouds that we are using from Sonlight are kept on a table next to our couches. This way they are accessible to us.
There is another table next to our couch which holds my journal, a pen and my bible. I keep it here so I have it for my morning quiet time. My children have been trained not to fiddle with this table.
We have two bookshelves in this rooms. The one holds all my books and the other picture story books and our bibles. These bookshelves undergo an intermittent “spring clean.” I assign one child the job of the picture book shelf. I have a
detailed list
for our children to follow on how to do it correctly.
We have two cabinets next to our TV. One holds our DVD collection and the other our CD collection. We have only a handful of videos which we tape onto for my husbands sporting events. These are labeled and kept separately to the children’s videos.
Easy tips to organize your dining room
Keep your dining room table clear of all but a vase of flowers as far as possible. I have noticed that as soon as I put one little pile of papers on this table it has babies and multiplies overnight.
In smaller homes, such as ones we have lived in before, the dining room doubled as the hobby place for sewing, scrap booking and the making of model airplanes. As much as I hated to have to pack these things up each time, we tried not to leave half finished hobbies lying out for long period of time when they were not touched. If I saw that there would be a period of a few days when I could not get to my hobbies, I would pack them into the plastic crate which has wheels and leave them in the room.
If you have a sideboard cabinet keep your candles, placemats and other dinner settings for casual and formal dinners. As we eat our other meals in the kitchen, we do not keep our cutlery and crockery here.
For those of you who do your schoolwork around the table, invest in a raw wooden crate for each child from a decor store. Allow your children to each decorate their crate with stencils. These can become their school boxes where they will keep any workbooks and their stationary. These can be carried to the dining room each day from
their rooms
or they can be stacked neatly in a corner.
Other pages you may be interested in are:
Organize your bathrooms
Organize your laundry
Organize your kitchen
Organize your outdoor areas
Organize your office area
For extra help and some ideas that really work...you can sign up for a series of organizational tips to help you take some
steps to becomming a more organized mom! Sign up below.
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