Article Views:
424
Ezine ready page
Ezine ready page
Posted on July 25, 2007 by Robin Gray | Posted under Self Improvement
How to Stylishly Organize Your Home
|
But a well-organized house doesn't have to be sterile. Home organization isn't about form, it's about function. Decluttering your home means throwing out all the objects that you don't want, don't like and don't need. You hold on to the stuff you love, use and need. Organizing your home means being able to easily and quickly find the objects you've decided to hold on to every time you want them. Neither says anything about how your home has to look - so you can make your decluttered and organized home look just as decorated as you want. Storage doesn't need to be in cabinets, although probably you want at least some of it to be so. It's a good idea to combine open and closed storage so that you can contrast a visually calm area of closed storage (hiding the necessary but not terribly pretty objects) with a more exciting visual feast of open display. If you're someone who likes to see a variety of objects “out", that's OK too. Just be aware of how things look when you get them, even very ordinary objects like food packets. If you have the choice, buy things which are interesting-looking and even color-matched as well as functional. Even the most eclectic mix of ordinary stuff can look intentional if you create order by the way you arrange them. Matching open wall units which cover a large area, especially if the shelving itself is outstanding in design and color, can impose an ordered grid on the contents. The closer together the shelving grid, the more ordered it will look. Repeating the shelving style within the same room, or throughout the house, gives a more designed look. One important factor is to include display space for posessions you love to look at. These can be displayed in collections, or singly with space around them so that each individual object stands out as something unique. Rotating objects to be displayed helps to make each one more special, too: you never get so used to seeing it that you become blind to it. While we want to see the items we like, there are other objects we don't want to see and which often make a space look disorganized. Some of the worst problems here are power and data cables, in their many variations. If you're renovating a room completely, try to design in concealment from the start - for example, there are hollow baseboard systems which act as wiring containers all around the room, as well as many other methods which will work. If you're just rearranging an existing room, take every opportunity to hide cables behind furniture and use cable wraps to corral the spaghetti of cables around most media systems. It's a good idea to keep power and data cables apart, as the fields around power cables can cause interference with data. A good way of checking how you're doing is to snap pictures of the space. Our eyes and brains are very good at “editing out" mess we don't want to see, but a photo shows the unedited version of how things really look. Keep rearranging and checking with photos until your house looks the way you want it to - then grab a well-earned rest and relax in your organized AND decorated room! About The Author: Robin Gray facilitates local organizing workshops in Western Canada and scribbles about organization and clutter at Declutter First!, the decluttering and home organization site. |
Tags: DECLUTTER, DECLUTTERING, CLUTTER, ORGANIZING, HOME ORGANIZATION, STYLE, DECORATOR, ORGANIZED STYLE
