I found an organizing book I LOVE! I took it out of the library to avoid adding clutter to my home, but it’s so good that I might end up with a kindle version to keep as a reference.
The book is called “One Year To An Organized Life” by Regina Leeds, a professional organizer who has been helping people in Los Angeles for over twenty years.
The book gives you a project a week to work on for an entire year, with the goal being that at the end of the year you will have a completely organized, clutter free home from top to bottom – and new habits that help it STAY that way.
It’s phenomenal, because every week is small enough to be do-able, but big enough to be significant… and it all adds up.
Even if you decide not to embark on a year long organizing journey, by flipping to the week or weeks where she outlines all the steps to organize the section of your home that you’d like to work on, you’ll have a detailed plan from an expert on how to get your space organized.
She gives great pointers for every section of the house about how to decide what you should keep and how you should organize it.
Take the kitchen – she has two paragraphs on what you should keep in your junk drawer, and some suggestions for keeping other things out of it. She suggests where to put kitchen utensils and items based on where you do food prep, so your items are better at hand. She gives you pointers for where to start the organization process (by purging and inventorying) and what to do next.
The book is interspersed with little anecdotes about clients that she’s had that illustrate different points, such as the client who unwittingly became a teddy bear collector because people kept gifting them to her although she never intended to start a collection. The grandmother who still had boxes of clothes from high school that would never fit her again but reminded her of her youth (take a photo, donate them to a better home!).
The minutiae of the advice in the book is extremely impressive. When you’re into a specific project, she’s got suggestions for how to label bill folders in your filing cabinet, how to make decisions about which toys to keep for your children and which to donate or store for grandchildren, and how to organize your digital photos. She even has sections devoted to being better organized around the holidays and when you’re traveling. It’s amazing.
Armed with her detailed suggestions for how to proceed, and two kids who are very interested in helping, it’s time to take on our pantry. Expired food, goodbye. It’s time to inventory what I have, get rid of food we can’t or won’t eat, and start buying more mindfully and deliberately in the future.
Looks like we’re having amaranth for dinner tonight. (Huh? What? Why did I think I could figure out what to do with it and buy it with no recipe, plan, or complementary ingredients?!?!)
I am definitely checking this book out. thanks Kelly!
It’s great! I am thinking it’d be an amazing project to actually do the yearly plan. Right now I’m definitely tackling a section of the house each week until further notice!
Just put this and another book on hold at my local library! Thanks! I need this, my house is driving me mad.
My house is driving me crazy too! Obviously! I love it, but there are many corners that we never quite got situated because we moved in only days before Will was born, and life has been crazy ever since, and our storage items and needs keep changing. I want to really tackle some of the food and clothes storage before preschool starts in the fall and I’m trying to get them out the door on time, sometimes with a healthy meal for lunch bunch!