Getting Started

I just know you are so ready to get started on our year-long journey of creating an organized life, home and work environment. I know it will be overwhelming at times and a bit hard when you have to decide to throw out things you have lived with for years.

There is no better time than right now to get started! I know I am running  behind because I am working on this right along with you. I had to take time over the last few day and put all the goodies together for this post so you will have everything you need right here in this post. Plus I have been working on organizing my kitchen and getting rid of the clutter we have created over the years. I have cleaned out drawers and now have so much space! Yay! My kitchen has never looked so organized. I don’t have cabinets only drawers and shelves in my kitchen now. We just went through a very big remodel on our kitchen and I am so glad I did.  I plan on sharing what we did once we get it totally finished.

Kitchen

Well here we go! Lets get started on the kitchen first. Everything happens in the kitchen right. So lets start on the kitchen first. Here is a list of what you can do and a few ideas to help you get your kitchen clean and organized over the next month. Please take  a few minutes and share photos with us we would love to see your progress. You can follow me on Instagram I will share a lot of the photos we took during the remodel there.

Drawers

Count the drawers and cabinets in your kitchen and divide them up equally over the month, or you can clean the drawers in week one and the cabinets in another week.

• Make sure you clean the cabinets and drawers as you go.
• Throw out all multiples of an item just keep the best one.
• Go through the silverware and throw out all odd forks, knives, spoons. Only keep the complete set or just splurge and buy a new set and throw out the old things.
• Throw out all lids with out a match or plastic bowls with out a lid.
• Get rid of all well-worn pots that have seen better days and only keep the good pots.
• Set up cooking stations, baking, pots, smoothie, coffee, and keep all the items for the station in the area. Use decorative baskets and jars to corral the items.

Pantry

• In the pantry area go through and clean out everything that has an expired date and use baskets and jars to put things into to keep them organized and together.
• I use clear Rubbermaid shoe boxes for the small items like tuna packets, ramen noodles, and coffee things. That way they are kept together and not all over the place and hard to see how much I have. They stack so well and look so neat in the pantry.
• Be sure to label all the bins. Here is the label maker I purchased, I love it.

Email

Now this is the hard part. Go through your email and unsubscribe to all those emails you never get a chance to read or do not plan on reading. I am working on that right now. It’s hard because you want to read the email but you only have so much time that you can set aside for reading emails.  If you haven’t set up a family email here is a post where I walk you through setting up a family email and a house email. Be sure to read both posts if you need to set this system up for your home. We have it set up and love it.

If you haven’t set up an email for all those stores that ask you for an email here is a link to the post where I walk you through setting it up. This is a great idea so that store emails don’t fill up your house and family emails. If you need to check a store flyer you will know exactly which email it’s in. Plus the best part you can do a massive delete of all the emails with out looking through the emails first.

Routines

This is a very important part of organizing your family. That is why this month we will take time to set up morning routines and evening. I put together a post “Family Morning Routine” that has a printable you can download and use to set up your routines. I laminated ours and put it on the refrigerator.

Take time and try out different routines and see which one works the best for your family. You might not have it completely worked out this month it may even take a couple of months to get the routine worked out and that is totally ok. It took us about 3 months to get a family routine completely worked out to where things were getting done when they were supposed to. Be patient with your family they will come around, it’s hard to change, but trust me it will come. When they see how much better life is with a plan and an organized home they will thank you for being persistent with them.

I have a couple of hours set aside to gather the things I will need for the week and set my week up on Sunday afternoon. I plan what I will be cooking for the week and do any prep work to make cooking go faster. This is when I plan my work week too.

Conclusion

Rome wasn’t built-in a day and an organized house wasn’t either. I know you will want to forge ahead and try new things but try to stay focused. Don’t try to do a lot of things at once. This is why I am breaking things down and doing things over the year and not a few weeks or months. I am doing this series so that you will completely accomplish an organized life.

It takes at lease 21 days to set a new habit in place in your life. So this is the reason we will walk through this slow and easy. You may organize your kitchen cabinets this week and next week find that you don’t like it the way it is and change things a little. Guess what that’s ok! I did the same thing. It took me awhile before I liked where everything was. I would move things on a weekly and sometimes a daily basis until I got the kitchen just how I wanted it. Then I made sure to label where everything went so my family knew where to put things when they unloaded the dishwasher.

It took me months to figure out how I wanted to organize my families calendar and emails. I am the one that just has to know everything in my house. I had to figure out a system that I could use to keep up with everyone’s appointments, and schedules, and doctors appointments. Not to mention my work schedule too. It took several months to get everyone on board with using the Google calendar and email system. It was a lot of trial and error and lots of learning the program on everyone’s part. But now we have it set up and everyone knows how to use it and knows how to use the microphone to set up appointments on their calendar, and how to access their email and I get every appointment sent right to my calendar and Google lets me know when there is a conflict of time and appointments are scheduled at the same time. It is such a great way to keep the family organized.

Well I hope you have a great month of organizing your kitchen and teaching your family how to use the Google email system. Please take a few minutes and sign up for my Newsletter. I will have all the blog posts in the email plus other goodies to help you along during our monthly organization challenge.

Sherry

 12 Step Plan for Organizing Your Year

We all face this every year. A New Year, a new me, I’m going to organize my life and my home. Then February rolls around and we have not done anything to accomplish our goals we set to organize our lives. We get caught up in the business of life and forget to take a little time and work on the goals we set just a couple of weeks ago.

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