Messy Room, Cluttered Home? - How to Organize Your Home Spaces To Prevent Clutter

If you have one messy room in your house be careful. Unless you pay attention to what is happening to create that messy room you may end up with an entire cluttered home! Clutter is a silent invader and it will creep into your home and take over unless you stop it. Clutter prevention starts first with your awareness that clutter is starting to build. Once your clutter alarms start to go off, do a careful analysis of your messy room so that you can put some clutter busting solutions in place. Analyze your messy room so that you are aware of the clutter zones. Look at each room in your house and analyze where stuff is building up. I will bet that you will see that your cluttered home is the result of not enough places to put things and when stuff does not have a home, it will land on any horizontal surface that is available. The first choice for a landing zone will be a surface that is about waist height. Humans simply prefer to place things in a convenient spot, and the height that is the most convenient is right about at waist level. So take a good long look at all the clutter in your messy room. A messy kitchen always has a cluttered counter. A messy bedroom usually has a cluttered bed and dresser surfaces. Stuff lands there because it is at a very comfortable height. If there is no comfortable height in close proximity then the next available surface at a lower height will be the landing area for all that stuff. Usually that is the floor. Take a look at the floor of your messy room - is there any stuff there? Children love dropping things to the floor. WHY? because it is so close to them! Clutter usually accumulates on horizontal surfaces at waist height and lower. The last place you will find clutter in your house is at a level that is higher that your shoulders and here is the reason why. First of all there aren't that many surfaces at that height and secondly it is uncomfortable to reach up to place items on a surface above shoulder level. People usually shy away from that. It is much easier just to let it drop down onto the nearest available surface because gravity assists with placing it on the floor! So now the question becomes "How to organize your home when the forces of gravity are working against you?" Here are two suggestions for how to organize your home spaces so that the forces of gravity do not encourage a messy room or a cluttered house.

1. Create places for stuff to land and stuff to live - this is especially important for the entry way and busy traffic areas like the kitchen. When you try to organize your home your best value for time spent will be in creating landing and launching pads close to the entry areas of your home. Organize your home entryway with benches, cubbies as storage for backpacks and boots as well as a hanging area for coats and a horizontal surface that serves as a place to put the mail or small packages. If stuff has a place to land when people come into the house it will stay there and not migrate into other rooms.


2. Look up...look way up! There is lots of space there. Putting up vertical shelving units is a great way to create extra horizontal landing surfaces or places for stuff to live. You can place items directly on the shelves or use plastic storage bins or even baskets to hold loose items. This is a great way to contain things like winter gloves, mitts, and scarves in the entry way. Just remember to select containers that are appropriate for the shelf and store often used items at about waist to shoulder height. Items that are accessed less frequently can be placed either on the higher and lower shelves. Heavier items should be placed lower down and the lighter items on the higher shelves.

These two suggestions can help you deal with a messy kitchen, a messy bedroom, or any messy room in your house. Create more places to put things using all vertical spaces and then consistently put the things in those places. That is the simple way to prevent a messy room from morphing into a cluttered home.