Unless you have few possessions, and are very, very organized, you probably feel that you are perpetually putting your house back together. If you have kids, you’ve probably given up a bit of the fight and have resigned yourself to some measure of chaos.
But you also probably feel that you would like to get your home at least somewhat better organized. What can you do? Here are some tips to getting your house realistically clean, and living with the inevitable:
Image: Matt Grommes / Flickr
1. Be reasonable about what you can achieve
Living with other people is always a compromise. At times, you will find their mess unbearable, and vice versa. The key thing is to find the manageable point between driving everyone else you live with crazy, and maintaining your own sanity.
2. Observe and analyze
A mess is a mess because it’s hard to keep things in their appropriate places. Sometimes this is because of the people you live with. But it is also might be because what you expect from other people is unreasonable. When a mess keeps reoccurring, think to yourself, “Is there a better way to organize things so that this doesn’t happen?”
3. Plan, plan, plan
As always, planning is essential. It may feel like you are investing a lot of time upfront to something that other people just intuitively do, but that’s because they already have their plans in place. Come to terms with the five aspects of your life that affect the condition of your home: budget, things, space, cleaning and how much time you have to do everything. If one factor is getting out of hand, maybe you need to push the burden onto another. For instance, if you need to clean all of the time, maybe you need to spend more money on more efficient cleaning solutions, or perhaps you need to get rid of some stuff.
4. Decorate to endure
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: choose furnishings and home decorating solutions to last. Choose durable (yet beautiful) flooring, cleanable textiles and furniture that won’t look terrible if the cat scratches it or the kids tear the fabric. Remember those crazy people who would put plastic slip-covers on their furniture to ensure they didn’t get dirty or used? Your home is not a design studio: don’t decorate it like one.
Finally, buy right the first time. You should only buy things you really, really need, not things you happen to see at a discount bin near the checkout. If you avoid those random, unnecessary purchases, you will likely have more money to spend on the furnishings you actually want.
Heleen Jacobsen
Broker of Record with InfoMarket Group GMAC Real Estate
www.infomarketgroup.com
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