How to Maintain an Organized Home

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Now that we’re at the end of the 5-week challenge, are you wondering how to maintain your organized home? We’ve worked hard to declutter and organize our home, now let’s talk about how to keep our home organized in the future.

If you missed any of the previous 14 Organized Home Challenge lessons, be sure to check them out. They lay the foundation of how to keep your house neat and tidy, in addition to addressing specific organizing challenges in different rooms in your home.

How to Stay Organized

1. Make a commitment to being organized.
2. Work through your home and create an organized home.
   1. Work with a professional organizer. I’m available for virtual organizing.
   2. Work through my 5-week Organized Home Challenge yourself.
3. Talk with your family and get their buy in to staying organized.
4. Establish organizing habits that will maintain your organized home.
   1. Put items away as soon as you’re done with them.
   2. Straighten up each evening.
   3. Straighten up each weekend.
5. Take photos of your organized spaces to use as a reference and motivation if your space becomes cluttered and disorganized in the future.
6. Understand that organization systems will need to be adjusted periodically to meet your changing needs.
7. Schedule organizing refreshes on your calendar.
   1. Schedule monthly or quarterly refreshes of organizing systems.
   2. Work through different areas and rooms of your home.
   3. When you’ve refreshed all areas in your home, start at the top of the list and work through them again.
8. Have a donation box in your home.
9. Don’t get discouraged, keep doing as much as you can and you will make forward progress to maintain your organized home.

How to Maintain an Organized Home

Make a Commitment to Being Organized

Even hyper-organized people work at being organized. You need to make a commitment to putting in the work to maintain your organized home.

You also need to talk with your family and gain their commitment to maintaining an organized home. This is not something you can (or should) do alone. Everyone in your family needs to be onboard.

You may be the one doing most of the maintenance tasks, but everyone needs to help out. And this is a great opportunity to teach your children how to be more organized at home – a critical life skill.

Work Through Every Space in Your Home and Get Organized

You can do marathon decluttering and organizing sessions or you can choose to work 10 minutes to an hour every day. You decide which method works best for you. Which ever you choose, be sure to stick with it and work to create the organized home that you want.

Realize that it took months or years for your home to become cluttered, so it will take work and time learn how to be more organized at home. Give yourself the time and commit to sticking through it until completion.

Check out these DIY Organizing Ideas from DIYIdeaCenter.

Establish Organizing Habits

Organization is a habit. It’s not necessarily difficult, but it does require discipline. Take the time to develop the habits you and your family need to maintain your organized home.

“A stitch in time saves nine” applies perfectly to decluttering and organization tasks.

Put items away as soon as you’re done using them. It only takes, at most, a few minutes to put things back away when you’re done with them. If you leave them sitting out, they become clutter magnets and before you know it, it will take much longer to put everything that has accumulated away.

Take a few minutes each evening to put things away. And when I say you, I mean you and your responsible family members. Everyone in the family should put away any items they are responsible for before heading to bed.

Each weekend take 30 minutes to an hour do more involved decluttering and organizing tasks.

Take Motivational Photos

Take photos of the organized spaces and room in your home. Use those photos as reminders of where items belong. Also use the photos as motivation if your home becomes cluttered and untidy. The photos will remind you of how your organized space looked and felt – providing motivation to declutter and maintain your organized home.

Make Adjustments

Your organizational systems will need updates, tweaks and adjustments. Even the organizational system that works well for months or years, may need an adjustment at some point.

Life changes. Our needs changes. Our home changes. Our belongings change. Organizational products that are available change.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to use a certain organizational system forever. If it’s not working for you, then change it and make it work.

Schedule Organizing Refreshers

Use your planner and schedule your organizing refresher sessions. Make these critical tasks an important part of your schedule. And since they’re important, actually block out the time on your calendar. My 33-page Monthly To Do Lists have home organization maintenance tasks planned out for each month of the year, in addition to providing space for you to add your own personal tasks.

Use a Donation Box

Locate a box or basket in your home that is designated for donation items. During the course of your day, as you come across items that you no longer need or want, immediately place them in your donation box.

This allows you to declutter your home and maintain your organized home on a routine basis. As soon as the box is full, immediately take it to be donated. Don’t allow clutter to pile up in your home. Instead take it right away to where someone who needs it now can use it.

Stay Motivated

You need to figure out how you will maintain an organized home. What will motivate you?

• Keep in mind the reasons you want an organized home.
• Use the photos you took.
• You may even choose to reward yourself and your family with an activity (don’t buy anything that will become clutter!) as a reward.

Find the motivation you need to maintain an organized home because you know that results will be worth the effort!

For more home organizing ideas:

• 75+ Repurposed Organizing Ideas
• The 5-week Organized Home Challenge
• 30 Days of 10-Minute Decluttering Tasks
• 30+ Kitchen Organizing Ideas
• 10+ Time Organization and Productivity Tips
• General Organizing Ideas
• 6 Easy Steps To Get Organized

Pin later for when you need encouragement in how to maintain your organized home.

Find all my best organizing tips, hacks, printables and favorite products in the table below. You can scroll though the table and look for ideas or search for specific ideas with the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner (on desktop). Click on the topic and then click through the specific article.