The (Dis)Organized Home

I’m big on organization. I despise clutter and feel at ease when everything is in its perfect place. Right now, you are probably thinking that having kids doesn’t mix with that type of mindset and you are 100% right. Actually, being married to Mathlete doesn’t exactly work with that whole “everything in its place” lifestyle either. I got over my need for “perfectly in its place” a long time ago but I still prefer to have the house pretty organized and clutter-less.
We have two major “clutter catchers”: the peninsula when you first come in the door from the garage and our (currently furniture-less) living room. The playroom stays a mess but that is an entirely different post!

When we first moved in, I went crazy buying a bunch of organizational “tools” from a type a personality’s dream store. Combined with the things I already owned, I was able to keep control of the mess for awhile. Then, baby E came along and all that went out of the window.
Today, Junior was headed to the Container Store for some organizational tools of her own. Hoping to get back to ~~mecca~~ a reasonable state of organization in our house, I had her pick me up a few things:

1) We get so many papers from Hailey’s school! I think they are the single biggest contributor to paper clutter in our house. I love the pink and green colors of these boxes so I got some in each size to hopefully create a place for me to put her papers each day.

2) The other biggest, child related, source of clutter are dolls. We have the princesses, the fairies and some other random type of doll. I was cruising around the website and came across the idea to use shoe bag to store the dolls. Genius! When I have some more time, I’ll probably try to stencil it or otherwise personalize it.

3) In the midst of all the paper and dolls, we have things like keys, sunglasses and other misc. items that come out of our pockets and onto the peninsula. Awhile back, I bought this charging station that has sections for all of those types of things. Now, I just have to get everyone back into really using it!

At the end of each day, I want our peninsula to look like this:

Our living room doesn’t get stuff put in it daily but it is a clutter problem in a different sense because everything gets dumped there: bags of stuff purchased at the mall, shoes, extra furniture…you get the idea. It has gotten so bad that some of items from the living room are migrating to the dining room making the mess stretch much farther than I like.

Unfortunately, there isn’t anything at a store that can just magically make this stuff go to its rightful home. So, that something is going to have to be me! H is skeptical that we’ll be able to accomplish this task…

Do you have a clutter problem or do you find ways to keep your house clutter free? Are there any organization products you just can’t live without?

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