What are your tips to have some sort of order in your home?

[Poppysball]

I struggle with ADD and find it very hard to focus on things, get very easily distracted. My house is generally clean but so chaotic. There is stuff everywhere. DH & I are forever trying to find things and often end up buying stuff again.

We moved in a year ago and have never actually agreed where certain things should go in the house and so we both put things in different places. The kitchen cupboards are a mess as is the utility room.
The children leave things all over the place (probably seeing me do it!) and I just find it hard to keep on top of things like washing, paperwork, tidying, food shopping, putting clohes away, just all of it really.

I’d like to make an effort in the nee year to get some order in the house as it creates stress and upset among the family with me & DH getting irritable when things are a mess and we can’t find anything.

I know it proabay sounds silly as to alot of people it is common sense and obvious but my brain doesn’t work that way and I find it really difficult.

Can anyone suggest anything I can try to make things better this year?

Place marking to see what others suggest, as I can relate my brain doesn't work that way either.
I'm pretty capable in other areas of my life but less so at this sort of stuff.

Thanks Greycat nice to find someone who understands. I am also capable in other areas like my job which requires great attention to detail but I just can’t figure out the domestic stuff.

I’m on this thread for tips but I have one of my own: less stuff. It sounds obvious but you do not need two hammers, or two hole punches or so many biros.

Honestly, I think it just comes down to time. You have to spend more time on the housekeeping than you currently are. It can mean getting up an hour earlier to do it. It can mean making an effort to spend an extra 15 minutes here and there doing it. It's totally up to you how you do the extra time, but you need to do it.

I also think that routine helps a lot.

Have a place for everything and make sure it goes back there after using.

If you don't need it, won't use it, dont like it, get rid of it.

The less stuff you have, the easier it is to keep organised.

Everything must have a "home" - if necessary you need to put labels on shelves to say what lives there.

Have a rubbish bin in every room and empty them all the day before bin day, every week.

Everyone should have their own dirty washing basket in their room , and all worn clothes should go there and nowhere else. They should also have their own clean washing basket with their name on it - fold clean clothes as they come off the line and put them in the appropriate basket. Put the baskets in their rooms so they know where their clothes are.

For paperwork, buy a filing cabinet and give every part of your life a section . School paperwork, insurance papers, personal papers etc all have a section. Only handle each piece of paper ONCE - if something comes in the mail which you have to keep, put it immediately into the filing cabinet in it's section. If you don't have to keep it, immediately throw it away.

In the kitchen, decide on where things will live and label the shelves. Crockery, tinned goods, dry baking ingredients, school snacks etc should all have a shelf. When you bring the groceries home, make sure things go where the label says.

Buy the kids some shelves for books, and a toy box. Insist that they put their stuff in it's "home" and not all over the house. They'll get the idea if they see you doing it too.

Always have a writing pad and pen on the kitchen bench - as soon as you use the last of something in the kitchen, write it on the pad so you have the basis for a shopping list each week. Download a grocery shopping template and use that too .

That's a few of the ideas that I find useful. Good luck !

Just re-reading what I just wrote - I hope it doesn't sound patronising to say that you should put labels on all your shelves. I didn't mean to sound like that. it's just that I had the same problem and did find that labels on every shelf were really helpful.

Whilst my home isnt perfect, I do have some things ive done which helps.

1. Have less stuff. Seems simple but the less there is, the less there is to tidy. As and when you do start clearing out/sorting, be as ruthless as you can bear. Get rid of boxes for stuff youve bought, get rid of broken stuff. Get rid of incomplete games or jigsaws. Stream movies now? Get rid of the dvds.
2. Pick spots around the house to focus on. Dont look at the whole Kitchen and think "oh shit". Look at a drawer. Decide what will live there, put everything else in another

drawer. Slowly make your way around the room. Even if it takes two weeks. As you put stuff away, use its new home.

1. Make it easy. Dont overcomplicate housework. If a messy drawer is needed, have one. If a big basket in the bathroom for toiletries is easier than individual boxes/shelves for various bits, have the big basket.
2. Always have laundry on the go. Its fucking dull as dishwater, doing laundry, and putting it away even worse. But just do a load every day. Wash it, dry it, stack by room. Anything communal put away there and then - bathroom and kitchen stuff. Clothes just keep a pile each of everyone going and eventually put all of one persons stuff away.
3. Big box for paperwork. Open letters, if its just for info, shove it in the Big Box. If it needs doing, do it now. Then shove in the Big Box. An in depth filing system only works if you have time and a propensity to stay organised. See point 3.

Yes less stuff is the best tip ever. Honestly it is just rearranging unless you get rid of it.

And do it in 15 minute blocks, over a year or 2. Dont ruin a week getting in a bigger muddle.

No not at all Birdie, I think labels are a great idea. I once labelled the airing cupboard shelves for different things and no-one else in the family took any notice!😩

I think i almost need to go through each room in the house wirh DH and agres on where things should live as if I decide on my own he will just carry on doing his own thing.

Ask a friend to come and help you declutter. That helped me become more ruthless about getting rid of stuff.

I have found the Organised Mum site pretty helpful. They have a new year decluttering challenge which you might like.

Agree to less stuff! A couple of times a year we have a clear out, of it hasn't been used we get rid to charity or tip! Every time we have moved house (a lot in the last 4 years ) we were ruthless so we had less crap to move! Everything has a home and at the end of the day it all goes back to its place.

Clean/tidy as you go, I never go upstairs empty handed I always bring stuff up that knocking around downstairs.

Have a look at the organized mum method which after you do the initial de-clutter you only need to spend half an hour a day cleaning. The hard part for you will be to initially get on top of it all, it gets easier after that. Just do one room at a time.

For me it's regularly tacking areas that accumulate clutter. In our house the worst culprit is the breakfast bar so I try & do it every day or else it just builds up. Next is the stairs, I clear them 3 or 4 times a week. Then the landing, I do it 1 or 2 times a week. The children are given 10-20 minutes every day, after they've had a snack & done any homework to tidy their rooms. 30 minutes on either a Saturday or Sunday. It means the bedrooms don't develop in to dumping grounds, well it does still happen but less frequently than before we introduced the daily tidying.

It can help to theme areas. For example I created a little area when I was redoing my kitchen so I have my cookbooks by a stool and worktop, and I had a socket put in with a USB port when we were rewiring. I keep basic stationery there as well. I use this area for menu planning, making lists and so on.

Honestly, I find it bonkersly hard too. I accepted a while ago that I have to write EVERYTHING down and I have to reduce the number of 'inboxes' I have and go through them regularly. That helps a lot.

I also am crap at estimating time. So I have to think quite hard about the fact that the online food shopping will take me an hour but making an appointment to get my hair cut will take five minutes. I just have no intuitive concept of those things taking different amounts of time so I have to think it through.

Also, I naturally prefer to do everything in one big swoop and then never do it again which is the opposite of how it works in the home. I had to sort of train myself but also accept that I cannot bear to do the same things every day, it kills me, so I vary it as much as possible.

I like Clutterbug on youtube. It's a bit cheesey but she categorises people's different organising and living styles and suggests methods which work best. She's running a 12 week declutter challenge at the moment, and next week's is the kitchen.

My 'works for me' tips:

I have 4 washing baskets in the box room (its a storage/junk room) for black/white/dark colour/light colour and everyone puts their clothes in. Clothes have to be inside out except socks and the pockets empty.

I wash socks and bras in laundry bags . I have 5-6 pairs of identical black socks for work and they go into a laundry bag at night ready for the wash.

I use those pegged hangers for small things either indoors or out

I have 2 dishwasher baskets , one being used , the other to get filled.

Blackboard in the kitchen and 'Bring' on the phone for lists.

Basket in the hall upstairs and one in the kitchen for recycling

I'm keeping up with the Declutter one thing a day and the Beauty Hoard , so it might get to the stage where I use up all the half botles of shampoo, but probably not .
I put the nearly empty ones on the edge of the bath and tell everyone to use these up before recycling day .

Paperwork is our biggest issue. My new solution is to take photos of the paperwork and ditch the hard copies.

So essential paperwork stays in hard copy but there is very little.

Stuff we need to keep for a year or more has a photo and goes into long term folder.

Stuff which is short term (most school stuff, events that have passed etc) has a photo and then goes into the temporary folder. Every couple of months I will go through this whilst sitting in front of the tv and delete any which are no longer needed.

My key moment was realising that I was associating things I had with money, and thinking that it was a waste of money to get rid of them.

This is not the case. The money you have spent on something is gone. You aren’t getting more value from something because you keep it longer.

The second thing I realised is that it’s not just my responsibility to do things. We started with what I call 😂 ‘pack tidying’. Everyone has a bag. You set a timer for ten minutes and you move together as a pack. You put things that are yours and in the wrong place in the bag. Nobody gets to break off the pack to put something in another room. You have to take it with you and put it there later with the pack. If you go alone, you get eaten by coyotes. (They go off and go on an ipad). Along the way, everyone is busy putting things away, wiping surfaces etc.

Another thing I do is put ten things away ffrom a surface. It can take seconds and makes a huge difference.

I watched i g on TV the other day, it was (I think) a Japanese woman who went into people's homes to help them declutter. (Think of Kim and Aggie but in USA).
She took all the clothes out of the wardrobes and drawers and put them in the bed. She then told the woman to go through each item carefully. If the wore it Andy liked it, they kept it. If they didn't wear it or like it, it went into a bag. Everything they kept was hung up immediately or folded in a way that clothes were not stacked in top of each other. The remaining clothes were sent to charity immediately.

In the kitchen, she said to deal with cupboards one at a time. Empty a cupboard, decide what was to be kept and what was to be got rid of. Repeat with each cupboard. Once this was done, then get everything out again and sort it into storage containers before putting back in cupboards in a more organised way.

The hardest thing is deciding what yo can let go of. A friend will support you, but shouldn't tell yo what to do with your possessions.

I've found the Marie Kondo method has really helped me transform the chaos of my house into something manageable. It's taking me a long time to work through the whole house, I've still got a few categories to do, but it is the best thing I've found for organising the house, working out how to store things in the most practical way and keeping things tidy. She has a show on Netflix at the moment called Tidying Up but also worth reading her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying.

I was always rubbish with paperwork and my dh used urge me to open my mail and ‘file it or bin it’ straight away. I bought a big box file and shove everything I feel I should keep in there and shred everything else.

On daily basis, I find tidying up the kitchen and living room every evening helps. I start the day with a reasonably clean living space so it’s easier to keep on top of it.
My dcs get chores too. It helps me now and will help them become more responsible adults.
I also follow this loosely so things done get too bad
www.flylady.net/d/getting-started/flying-lessons/control-journal/step-11/

The money you have spent on something is gone. You aren’t getting more value from something because you keep it longer.

As someone told me once, if you don't need it but put it away in the wardrobe, that won't make the money you spent on it come flying out at you. As you say, once it's gone, it's gone.

I do think looking at your house critically and identifying your problem areas and thinking of ways to overcome these problems helps a lot. I put a bin in my hall and it's so useful, not just for junk mail, but rubbish from the car or if we've been out for the day. I also put a washing basket in my living room, so when the kids start pulling off their socks and jumpers and things after school, I get them to put them straight in the basket rather than the living room being constantly a wasteland of dirty socks.