Ours is, I’m sure, a typical entranceway to a home: a pile of coats, hats, backpacks – everything but the kitchen sink. And with limited space and a packed closet, it seemed like there was no way to keep the space organized.
Enter Linda Vanderkolk, owner of ClutterBGone, a company that specializes in home de-cluttering. She set aside four hours to organize my entryway, and I thought, “There’s no way it will take that long!” But she informed me that I had it backward. “Cleaning and organizing are two different things,” she said. I could always make the space look tidy, but it was never truly organized.
Vanderkolk’s steps to organizing are easy to remember if you use the word SPACE, which stands for the following:
Sort. Put everything in piles according to type, such as coats, hats, boots etc.
Purge. Ask yourself: Do you need it? Do you love it? Do you use it? If you can’t answer yes to one of those questions, then the item must go.
Assign a home. If you have 10 coats in your closet, make sure you have 10 hangers.
Containerize. Label shelves and containers so everyone knows where everything belongs.
Equalize. Create a system to maintain your organization. It could be five minutes per day of putting away your things.
So we started by sorting items, putting hats with hats and coats with coats – then sorted each group by owner.
I even went to each bedroom to pull extra coats and shoes so we had huge piles of everything we owned.
Then we started purging! We realized that my son, Ben, has five hats. He doesn’t need five hats, and he only wore two of them. So we donated or threw out the others, depending on how they looked. After we were done with everyone’s things, Vanderkolk asked me to leave so she could work her magic. Magic indeed!
When I returned, I was stunned. Here’s how Linda organized my space.
- Added a hook for our grocery bags and a bucket for the dog collars.
- Replaced my mismatched hangers with a beautiful set of matching wooden hangers that makes the space look cohesive.
- Put in a hanging unit for extra shoes, a shoe rack on the floor for the kids, and one above it for the adults.
- Set up a basket for each person for their own hats, umbrellas and helmets.
It seems like there is more space than before, and Vanderkolk was able to incorporate all the shoes and coats we had hidden away in our bedrooms. There was even extra room for my cat to find a perch on the bottom shelf.
When my children came home, their jaws dropped. My son was ecstatic that he has his own “place” for his boots and hats. And I was thrilled to have an entryway that I will easily be able to keep organized, one that offers a calm welcome every time I walk in the door.
for more information, visit clutterbgone.ca
