Decorator-Style Organizing

Maybe you’ve seen pictures of “minimalist” spaces in books which look very spare and thought, “I don’t want to live in a boring room like that!”

Function, not Form

But a well-organized house doesn’t have to be like that. Home organization isn’t about form, it’s about function. Decluttering your home is about getting rid of all the objects that you don’t want, don’t like and don’t need. You keep the items you need, use and love. Getting your home organized means being able to more easily find the posessions you’ve decided to keep any time you need them. Neither says anything about how your home has to look – so you can make your decluttered and organized house look just as magazine-worthy as you want.

Storage options

Storage doesn’t need to be behind closed doors, although probably you want a fair amount to be so. It’s a good idea to mix open and closed storage so that you can contrast a visually calm area of closed doors (hiding the necessary but possibly ugly objects) with a more exciting visual feast of open display.

If you’re someone who likes to see everything on display, that’s OK too. Just pay attention to how things look when you buy them, even very ordinary objects like food packets. If you can choose, buy things which are beautiful and even color-coordinated as well as useful.

Organized Display

Even the most random mix of ordinary stuff can look organized 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 assertive in design and color, can impose an ordered grid on the contents. The closer together the shelving grid, the more organized it will look. Repeating the wall unit style within the same space, or throughout the house, gives a more ordered look.

One important element is to include display space for posessions you love to look at. These can be displayed in groups, or individually with space around them so that each individual object stands out as something unique. Rotating objects on display helps to make each one more special, as well: you never get so used to seeing it that it disappears.

Hiding the Ugly Necessities

While we enjoy seeing the possesions we love, there are other things we don’t need to have on display and which only make a space look messy. Some of the worst problems here are power and data cords, in their many variations. If you’re redesigning a space completely, try to design in concealment from the outset – for example, there are hollow baseboard systems which act as wiring pathways all around the room, along with many other methods which will work. If you’re simply redecorating an existing space, take every opportunity to hide cords inside furniture and use cable wraps to corral the spaghetti of cables around so many media systems. Try to keep power and data cables separate, as the fields around power cables can cause interference with data.

Taking Stock

A good way of checking how you’re getting on is to snap photos of the area. Our eyes and minds are very good at “editing out” mess we don’t want to see, but a photo shows all the details of how things really appear. Keep arranging and checking with pictures until your space looks the way you want it to – then grab a well-earned rest and relax in your stylishly organized space!

More about organizing your home