5 Game-changing Home Organisation Ideas

Okay, you may think I’ve sank into the depths of boooorrrrrrring posts, but as an organisation geek, I can’t get enough of home organisation and routine blog posts and YouTube videos (I know, I know, everyone line up to be my friend), so this post might not appeal to everyone BUT I know there are my people out there who enjoy these too… Enter: my 5 Game-changing Home Organisation Ideas. 

So I’m looking forward to sharing this evening some home/life organisational changes and shortcuts that we’ve made since New Year, and already they’ve made a HUGE difference to how we run our home or lives and/or the space within it.

At the beginning of January I wrote a big ‘bucket list’ containing all sorts of things, big and small, that were niggling me home/life-wise and that needed tweaking. Everything from interiors projects like buying and hanging prints (on-going) to sorting out various kitchen cupboards. We’ve been in our home nearly 16 months now, and during that time carried out some hefty building work. That combined with being pregnant and knackered for half of last year, and then having another small baby and continuing to be knackered meant that sorting certain jobs were put on the back-burner for a while. Which is fair enough- life is busy! And I also think you need to live somewhere for a while first before you can shift possessions about and work out how to use a space for the better first. Anyway, I digress, but there have just been lots of things that have needed sorting in order to make life run a little (or a lot) smoother. 

I challenged myself to sort 2/3 things on the list a week, depending on the complexity of them, and went from there. And I’m actually pleasantly surprised with the results! 

Here are the things that have made a big difference so far in our home:

The Stair Basket

This has been a game-changer for me in terms of minimising clutter throughout the day. EVERY home inevitably has a ‘stair pile’ of crap that grows as the hours tick by, only for family members to trip/walk over it/carry it upstairs and dump haphazardly elsewhere. This is an old basket that lives at the bottom of the stairs from morning onwards, and when it’s full of stuff I take it upstairs and reunite the items with their correct home. The basket then stays upstairs overnight and comes down with bits and bobs that belong downstairs. Sounds so simple, but collecting everything together in one place means there are no random ‘bits’ floating around- I just chuck everything in the basket. I have no idea how we managed without one before!

A Parking App

Our London borough uses something called ‘Ringo’ in its council car parks, so if you’re without change you can call up an automated service and pay and register your car, something I’ve been doing for a couple of years now. What I didn’t realise is that there is now an app now where I can pay for parking much quicker than over the phone. It literally takes seconds and has made a huge difference to juggling unloading baby/shopping and making a phone call. I am ridiculously pleased with this!

Adjustable Shelving

I bought this adjustable shelving from Amazon the other day after seeing it on Emily Norris’ YouTube channel, and it’s already helped greatly one of 3 ‘cupboards of doom’ we have in our kitchen. This is a boring utility cupboard (see dull as F photo above), but we can now fit so much more in thanks to the way you can tweak the height and width of the shelves- before everything was just chucked in and it looked terrible, plus was difficult to use. 

Making use of the insides of cupboards

Some of you may do this already, but it never occurred to me to use the inside of kitchen cupboards to stick useful information. We’d always used the side of the fridge before, but this was cluttered with kids drawings, certificates, as well as the useful information that was often stuck together and not clear to see due to lack of space. I now use the biggest cupboard in the kitchen to bluetack beavers/rainbows timetables, spellings to practice, passwords for websites, school dinner menu and details of other events that are taking place. Another game-changer and I now feel even more organised having all the info out of sight, yet at my fingertips. 

Sorting the Medical Stash

Another boring job but one that took 10 minutes and saved lots of space. I found two storage containers, and went through all of our medicines, pills etc, chucking any that were out of date (there were a lot!), and then splitting them into children’s and adult. We can now see easily what we have (so no longer buying yet another bottle of Calpol when we have three already), and there’s less wastage. 

So there are my big and little changes so far that have made me pretty happy when it comes to our home/life organisation, and I’m looking forward to implementing many more this year. I also sorted out our loft the other weekend which was a HUGE thing, but I reckon that may warrant a post of its own (you lucky, lucky people).

Do you have any life-changing tips for a smooth-running life and home? Always keen to add another idea to the potential list! 

Have a look at some more of my home organisation posts.