Living or Family Room A. Can you use multi-purpose furniture such as coffee tables, storage cubes, or ottomans with storage inside for children's toys, extra blankets and pillows, or board games? B. List all the purposes and activities that will take place in the room. Divide your living room into zones. Find storage solutions for your TV and DVDs. Store DVDs or CDs in a cabinet or shelving system that will help keep out dust. Keep all remotes in a basket in a central location.
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Dining Room A. Is there always stuff piled up on your dining room table? Determine what the stuff is and what solutions can be made to conquer the clutter so you and your family can sit down and share a meal. For example, do you use the table for hobbies such as scrapbooking? Make sure you have a solution for your scrapbooking supplies such as a plastic drawer system on wheels. Does your table get piled with mail and other papers? Designate a basket or wall folder system to hold all the papers, magazines, and newspapers that come into the house. Make sure you dump the junk mail as soon as it arrives. Empty the basket on a daily basis. B. A china cabinet for storage or another storage cabinet for fine china? Depending on your lifestyle you might want to have storage for your everyday dishes (maybe even plastic dishes that are within your kid's reach, so they could set the table for dinner all by themselves).
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Kitchen: A. Clear up your countertops. Put away any used (but not used often items or appliances such as a bread machine) into drawers or cabinets. Take a look at some of your appliances and if you haven't used it in 12 months then it might be time to donate it to charity or a friend who could use it. This also works with all the little gadgets such as lemon zesters and melon ballers that might not be used and cause clutter in drawers. Empty the contents of a drawer into a box and put it into your garage or a closet. If you need an item, go get it, use it, and put it back in the drawer. Determine a time to clean out the box (such as a month, 3 months, 6 months, or even a year) and donate what is left in the box to charity. B. Arrange zones or stations in the kitchen to make your life simpler and easier. For example, coffee, filters, mugs, and the coffee maker should be near each other to make it easy and convenient to make coffee in the morning. Another zone may be your baking zone. Include baking supplies like flour and sugar, cookie sheets, measuring cups, etc.
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7) If you do have an offsite storage unit that you are paying for, it's important to know exactly what is in there. Then you can determine where you might be able to store the stuff at your home so it won't cost you so much money. You might also decide that the stuff in storage isn't worth paying that amount of money for any longer. 8) You might be asking yourself what is 'nifty' about getting rid of stuff. By cutting back on the quantity of things that we have, we can more fully enjoy the items that we are keeping. If we only have a few select pieces or collectibles, they can be properly displayed inside the home. Spending money to collect things that we just end up storing is neither nifty nor thrifty! |