Filed under: Before and After pix
- sewing room BEFORE
- sewing room AFTER
This sewing/craft room was too cluttered to even be used.
Home office, before:
By utilizing storage boxes, vertical sorters and binders, we were able to create order out of the piles. Everything has been assigned a place to make it easy to quickly find things and to maintain the order. Organizational products can be found pretty much anywhere these days, but some of my favorites include Ikea, The Container Store, Target, Menards and Office Depot.
Filed under: Before and After pix
Here’s a closet that, due to a slanted ceiling, has limited space. We worked with a local closet company to create a closet system to make the space more functional. This is actually one really long closet with two sets of doors, so here are two different sets of ‘before’ & ‘after’ pictures to show how we maximized the space.
Before:
After: 
Before: 
After:
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Reduce Clutter
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Keep only things that you use/need/love
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Be realistic (if you haven’t used/worn it in a year, it’s time to get rid of it)
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Enlist help (friend, family or professional)
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Donate, Recycle or Toss things you don’t use/need/love
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- Reorganize/Repurpose things in your home to make your life easier
- i.e. spice cabinet –> spice drawer (see attached before & after pictures)
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- The cabinet made it hard to find things, drawer makes all spices visible and accessible
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If needed, invest in shelves/drawers so you have a place to put things
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Limit what you bring in to the house
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shop only when you need something
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don’t buy something just because it’s on sale
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Here’s a BEFORE picture of a pantry that needed a little organizing attention:
BEFORE
The first step was to clear out the entire pantry. This was a great opportunity to wipe down all of the shelves and give the floors a quick cleaning. We decided that more shelving would help to keep things more organized, so we adjusted the current shelves and added a shelf to both the side wall and back wall. This gave us more space to put similar items together and to create a place for everything.
AFTER
Though the angle of the picture doesn’t quite capture the full effect of the reorganization, there is, in fact, much more order in this pantry. With the addition of the two new shelves (one on the side wall, one on the back wall) there is more room to categorize all of the pantry items. There is now a clear pathway into the pantry and there is still additional storage space underneath the bottom shelf. It will now be easier to find everything in this pantry and will make creating a shopping list much easier when you can tell what you have and what you need.
Here are some closer-up views of the pantry to show the newly organized shelves:
Ah, the junk drawer. The random catch-all area of the house. Here’s an example of a mighty cluttered, not-at-all-organized junk drawer:
BEFORE
The first step to creating order in this drawer is to SORT through everything. Remove items that belong in a different part of the house; toss anything that is broken or “unknown”; put like items together.
Once everything is sorted, it’s time to “CONTAINERIZE” everything that needs to go back into the drawer. Yes, you can buy some new cute matching containers at the store, but it’s just as easy to use things you already have around the house (think, old check boxes or other containers you would otherwise recycle or toss.)
AFTER
As you can see, this drawer now has a sense of order. It is easier to find things and, because of all of the containers, it will be easier to put things back where they belong.
