MASTER ORGANIZING

Do you know what’s under your kitchen or bathroom sink?  Here are some tips to help you organize the space under your sink… be it the kitchen or bathroom:

1.  Take everything out from under your kitchen or bathroom sink.

2.  Put like things together, be it lotions, soaps, or cleaning supplies.  That  way you will be able to see the quantity of something your have.

3.  Go ahead and take this time to clean/wipe down the space underneath the sink.

4.  Decide where to place like items together.  Placing items that you use less often in the back and items that you use daily in the front for easy access.

You may have more items than shown in the pictures above and if you do, I recommend considering if your really utilize all the items.  If you don’t really use all of the items that you have underneath the sink, then let some of them go by donating them, giving them to family and friends that would use them, or responsibly discarding them.  Otherwise under sink storage shelving is excellent.

Take measurements of your space to ensure that you purchase products that fit your space and style!  Cheers to under your sink organizing!

Expecting?

Here’s a checklist of the basic items to pack and organize in preparation for the birth of your little bundle of joy:

Birth plan and important documents: Copies of your birth plan, identification card (Driver’s License), medical insurance information, pediatrician information, and a map to/around the hospital (if you haven’t already been to the hospital that you are delivering in).

For Labor Comfort:

• Night gown, robe slippers, socks (keep in mind these are items you don’t mind trashing at the hospital)
• Tennis ball and/or favorite pillow to keep you comfortable
• Snacks for you and your partner (trail mix, granola bars)
• Games, music, or a favorite magazine.  For me I will be carrying sudoku.

After Birth:

• Toiletries: toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, moisturizer, deodorant, hair ties/clips to keep your hair out of your eyes during labor and lip balm (lips can get chapped during labor.) The hospital may have soap, shampoo, and lotion, but you may prefer your own brands.
• Eyeglasses/contacts if you wear them
• Cell phone and cell phone chargers
• Camera to capture this special moment
• Maternity outfit that’s loose fitting, you won’t know what will happen in the delivery room, so you don’t want to pack anything that will constrict you.
• Underwear (several pairs) that can support extra-absorbent maxi-pads (postpartum bleeding will be in full effect) and a maternity bra.
• Baby Outfit: undershirt, onesie, a sweater or light fleece jacket (in the winter), socks or booties, a receiving blanket, and a hat (even if your baby is born in a warm-weather month, it’s cold outside the womb). Also, don’t forget to pack extra diapers and wipes (the hospital will probably provide you with them, but you can never be too prepared!)
• Spouse/Relative/Friend who is staying with you throughout your delivery needs to bring extra clothing and toiletries.
• Cash for parking and vending machine.

Infant Car Seat: the hospital will not let you go home with the baby without this!

You can divide the items you pack into 2 separate bags, what will add to your  ”comfort for labor” and what you’ll need “after birth.”  Just bring the “comfort for labor bag” in first and your spouse/friend/relative can retrieve the “after birth bag” later.

Am I forgetting anything or is there anything that you used during your labor that you thought was helpful?  Feel free to comment below on anything I missed or what you thought was extremely helpful during your stay at the hospital!

Moving can either be a blast or it can really suck the life out of you.  If you know in advance that you are moving in a few months..start early, you don’t have to wait the week before movers come to start packing things up.  Here are 5 tips to help your move run more smoothly:

1.  First thing you want to do is donate, recycle, give way to family and friends that help you move, items you no longer have any use for.  The less items that you have, the less you have to pack up and move into your new place.  Make sure the items that you keep are either something USEFUL or LOVED BEYOND MEASURE.  Keep only things you want and go through one area of your home at a time.

2.  Pack items that you know you won’t be using until you move into your new place.  Like extra kitchen or bathroom supplies.

3.  Label..Label..LABEL the boxes that you use to pack up your things.  You can even go further and label boxes by room, then what is contained in the box.  For example: “Bathroom: toilet paper, soap lotion. ” NackIt may be a great resource, label makers can always help, or simply use duct tape and a permanent marker to label your packed boxes.

4.  Know the measurements of your new home.  Furniture that may fit in your home now may not fit in your new home.  Don’t waste time and energy moving pieces of furniture that you can’t visualize or realistically fit into your new home.

5.  If you ever feel distracted or unmotivated by your move, remember the reason why you are moving to help motivate you.

Happy Moving!

Organizing MacGyver Style:  Reuse plastic Easter eggs this year and save on plastic sandwich/snack bags.  Fill the plastic Easter eggs with your child’s favorite snacks or even surprise your kiddo with a new snack every time.  Have more than one child?  How about assigning a different colored egg for each child that you have. Possibilities are endless with these colorful Easter eggs!

Photo provided by D Sharon Pruitt

This April 22nd what are you doing for Earth Day?

Photo provided by woodleywonderworks

Don’t know? Try these 5 green organizing tips:

1. Reuse the other side of your already used paper.  Have a container as a home for potential reusable paper.
2. Reduce junk mail by signing up for Catalog Choice, Direct Marketing Association or Opt Out Prescreen.
3. Recycle plastic bags at local grocery stores or better yet, cut up old t-shirts and make them into reusable bags to hold your stuff instead of taking a plastic bag from the grocery store.
4. Have a Spring Neighborhood Yard Sale for Charity.  This green organizing tip not only raises money for charity and brings you closer to your neighbors, but you will also get rid of the unnecessary items in your home that you no longer need!
5. Get rid of clutter by not letting it in your home in the first place and recycle what you do bring into your home.  This young couple did it for a year and is continuing to do so.   For more inspiration you can follow this couple at Green Garbage Project.  If they can do it you can too!

Don’t know where to donate or recycle consider these options:

• Eco Atm: is the first and only company to create an automated self-serve kiosk system that uses patented, advanced machine vision, electronic diagnostics, and artificial intelligence to evaluate and buy-back used electronics directly from consumers for cash or store credit.
• gazelle: is a reCommerce service that helps you sell and recycle your used electronics.
• Household Hazaedous Waste/E-Waste Collection Sites in Los Angeles County
• Earth911 is an environmental services company that addresses solutions for products’ end-of-life for both businesses and consumers.
• freecycle is made up of 4,937 groups with 8,389,381 members around the world. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns.

Happy Earth Day!

Wowzers over 400 Professional Organizers rocked San Diego at  this year’s National Association of Professional Organizers conference. Here’s a recap.

The Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD) won the Organizers’ Choice Award for Best Service .

(Pictured above, left to right: Dana Bond, Master Cruz, Jim Andrews and Cathy Bock)

Count down of my favorite five organizing products from this year’s conference:

5.  Life STYLE File Tote:  The convenience of a file box and elegance of a stylish handbag.  Immediately I thought of Wedding Planners and Brides when I saw this stylish box to contain all of the wedding papers and ideas. There’s a Woman’s Day Sale going on now through May 15th.  Very Stylish!

4.  The Tote Buddy:  Eco friendly meets user friendly.  The worlds first reusable bag organizer.  Making it easier to hold, store, and shop with reusable bags.  The Tote Buddy neatly holds piles of reuasable bags, helping you to declutter and stay organized for every shopping trip.

3.  Evernote: Makes it easy to remember things big and small from your notable life using your computer, phone, and the web.

2.  Filertek: A revolution in file indexing systems for hanging files with its own unique built in writing surface that can be reused over and over.  The writing surface is protected by a clear cover and is always ready to use, together with the unique Filertek dry erase pen.  Available online at Amazon and Office Max.

1.  cocoon: GRID-IT!™, an internal organization system that allows the user to customize and reconfigure the interior organization as their needs and cargo evolves.

Lastly, the most wonderful thing about NAPO conference is seeing old and making new friends!  Conference is the time for Professional Organizers from all over the world to come together and share our passion for organizing.

(Pictured above left to right: Alejandra Costello, Heidi Chianta, Mona Brantley, Barbie Wenstrup, Master Cruz, and Christy Hicks at The Container Store getting our bags that were recycled from yoga mats…how neato is that!)

For more pictures from this years NAPO conference checkout: NAPO Conference 2011

Actor Bradley Cooper plays the role of writer Eddie, the main character  in this Spring’s movie hit Limitless, who takes the pharmaceutical drug “NZT” to become a smarter and more efficient human being.  Soon after taking the drug, one of the  first things that Eddie does is organizes his apartment before he efficiently completes the once stressful task of writing and completing his book.

Well here’s a secret, you don’t need “NZT” to get a clear mind.  Clearing your space by organizing allows your mind to become uncluttered and free.  Disorganization causes stress, which hinders you from letting positive energy and a clear mind from entering your environment.   A disorganized space can be very distracting, causing you to be unproductive and stressed out.

Here are 5 tips to get you organized and stress free:

1.  Instead of leaving items out to remind you of what you need to do (ie that stack of papers on your desk), set a date to concentrate on each item and make a home for it until you are ready to focus on that item.

2. Establish homes for items and put them back when you are done utilizing them.

3. If you don’t know where to place something, ask yourself where you would look for an item an make it’s home there.

4.  Communicate with people that you share the space with, where to place items back when they are done using them.

5.  If you live or work in a small space, consider what you are bringing into that space from the outside.  Before purchasing or bringing anything back to your space, consider where that new item’s home is going to be.

You want your space to be a place of open creativity, not bombarded by disorganization and stress!  Follow these tips and you are naturally on your way to limitless opportunities!

The best part of having your own home office is that you can set it up any way that you want…

When organizing your home office, first ask yourself this: What do you envision your home office to be like?  Will you be paying bills in your home office? Will it strictly be just for your business?  Are you going to be sharing your home office with anyone else in the household?  Are you going to be storing inventory in your home office?  Will you allow personal mail to go through your office?  Will your children be doing homework in your home office?  Will it be a themed home office like the one pictured above (thanks to JAGwired for sharing) Decide what you will allow in your home office.

Once you’ve envisioned what your home office will be used for, set-up zones.  Think about where you would like to place your desk, computer, printer, telephone, files, office supplies, books, memoirs, memorabilia, and mail that comes though your home office daily.  Sometimes electrical outlets in your wall will dictate where you place your desk and computer, so that you don’t have wires going across the your home office floor.

Place files vertically so that you can see them and easily access them.  If these files were in a pile on your desk, they could potentially fall over and get all mixed up.  Place office supplies that you use on a regular basis near or on your desk and the rest of the overflow of office supplies in a designated area.  You could store the rest of the office supplies in a decorated box that matches your office decor, in a desk drawer or cabinet.  I suggesting storing overflow items that you least use in higher shelves and cabinets and items that you use more often in lower shelves and drawers so that you can get to them easily.

Communicate with the people you share your home office with, where things should go when they are done utilizing them, this will help you to maintain your home office.  Cheers to having a functional and inspiring home office!

“Things live by moving, and gain strength as they go.”  - Bruce Lee

How is your New Year’s Resolution coming along?  In many cases when people set a New Year’s resolution, there is the perfectionist side that comes out.   Organizing your life is what many people have in mind as a New Year’s Resolution.  Typically after a month or so, you can tend to lose motivation and go back to your old habits.  We can get paralyzed by our perfectionist self.  For example, in the case of dieting, you have that piece of cake that you weren’t suppose to have, feel guilty about it (because of our perfectionist self) and toss your New Year’s Resolution of dieting out the window.  You are setting yourself up for failure if you allow the perfectionist side to come out and consume your motivation to continue what you want to change in your life.

Weather in dieting, exercising, learning to play an instrument, or even in organizing, I have always felt that if someone wants to get something done, they make the time to do it and keep at it even if you come across some relapses or speed bumps.  Set dates and in small chucks accomplish what you set yourself out to do.  If you miss a day, don’t punish yourself, keep moving.  Like training for a marathon, you can’t just show up on race day and run a marathon, it takes practice and endurance.  Same concept with organizing.  Don’t loose motivation for something you want like an organized desk, because you have failed to get it accomplished on a certain day.  Life is full of failing moments, but just keep moving forward.  Good enough is wonderful.

My suggestion to this sick cycle of setting yourself up for failure and loosing motivation is to not wait to try something or get something going.  Every new day is a fresh start.  New beginnings happen each year, each birthday, each month, each week, each day, each moment. It’s never too late to start organizing anything!

Whether you are planning to renovate your home, purchase a home, purchase a car, host a themed party or landscape your yard, many people get visual ideas from magazines.  But where do you “make a home” for all of your visual research?  Well just create a DIY File Folder for all of those magazines that you bought for research.  In this case, this is “making a home” for  the arrival of a new baby:

1.    Gather all the magazines and look through one magazine at a time. 

2.  When you are going through the magazine, fold the pages that are of importance to you.  This saves time from having to go through the magazine again to find that article that was important to you.  I would suggest folding the page that is important to you, in and on top of itself, to remind you what side of the page to look at later on.

3.  When you are done going through the magazine, tear out the folded pages that are important to you and recycle the rest of the magazine.  Again, folding the magazine page in let’s you know that the information inside the fold is what is of importance.

4.  Gather all of your ripped pages and categorize them.  In this case the four piles are: resources, charts to use, baby shower wants, and to complete (ie., medical forms)

5.  Use clear sheet protectors and an old folder to incase these magazine pages.

6.  Don’t forget to label, especially if you are sharing your ideas with others.

Now this “home” for your magazine cut outs is a wonderful visual foundation.  You can keep adding to it if you need to and review each section at a time more convenient for you.  Instead of having tons of magazines cluttering up your home, you have a great visual summary in your file folder!