How to Organize Home Essentials

You need to have home supplies to have a functioning home, but you don't want to open a cabinet and have two dozen paper towel rolls crash down on your head. A well-supplied and organized home makes your life easier because you not only have what you need, but you know where to find it when you need it. Getting things in order will take a time investment, but after you get your home essentials organized, you just have to keep them stocked in the right place.

Things You'll Need

• Containers of various sizes and types: wire crates, gallon jars, baskets, cardboard boxes, storage boxes, plastic crates, vintage containers.
• Labels and a permanent marker or a label maker
• Trash bags

Instructions

1. Make a list of the home essentials your household needs in order to function properly. Before you can organize, you have to know what you're organizing.

2. Decide how often you want to shop for home essentials: weekly, monthly or bimonthly. Now, look at your list again and determine how much you need to stock to last through your chosen shopping cycle. How much toilet paper, shampoo and dog food do you need every week, two weeks or month?

3. Make a simple plan for where you want to store the home essentials. The best practice, generally, is to store items near their point of use. Kitchen essentials in the pantry or a kitchen cabinet; bathroom essentials in or near the bathroom; and others distributed in hall closets, bedrooms, etc. according to where they are used.

4. Clear out those spaces that you will use for storing home essentials of any other junk or misplaced items that may be cluttering the shelves and space.

5. Sort and categorize your home essentials, then go through your collection of containers to hold the different categories. Keep like items together.

6. Label each container with what it now holds, forexample "hair products," or "mailing supplies."

7. Make a master list of each container and what it contains and where it will be stored. Keep this list taped to a kitchen cabinet or in a desk drawer so you can quickly find it and thus locate the item you need without digging through every cabinet in your house.

8. Distribute the containers to the locations where you will be keeping them: bathroom items, now sorted into containers, to the bathroom closet, and so on through the categories and storage areas.

9. Distribute newly purchased home essentials to the appropriate containers as soon as you get them back home. Don't let them sit out to "do it later," as they will end up shoved in some random closet or cabinet and you'll be back where you started.

References

• "Household Cleaning: Cleaning Supplies"; University of Tennessee Extension

Resources

• Organizing and Storage Supplies from Crate & Barrel