12 Months of Home Organization

Do you make New Year's resolutions?  I generally don't.  Or at least I don't think of them that way.  It seems a little too much like following the herd and setting myself up for failure to specifically label something as a New Year's Resolution.  But I do sometimes have little goals or plans in the back of my head, bad habits I want to correct, or good habits I want to start doing more of.  You know, the usual stuff - drink more water, exercise more, get back to healthier eating after the holiday binges, etc.

So today I thought I'd tell you about one of my little plans for 2015.  I have this bad habit of going on crazy organizing sprees around the house.  I'll let it go and let it go until the entire house is driving me insane and I can no longer put anything away, and then I'll exhaust myself trying to organize and clean it up all at once. Well this coming year I'm going to try not to do that!  My goal is to have one or two major organizing jobs each month, to spread it out and keep our home organized throughout the year.

Click the image to open a word doc version that you can save and customize for yourself. 

I've come up with a plan for organizing throughout the year, assigning myself jobs for each month. This is somewhat customized for our climate and family schedule, so if you click on the image you can get a word doc version that you can go ahead and edit for your needs.  (or click here if you want to just print a pdf of my exact version.)

I grew up in southern California, where the idea of putting summer clothes away for the winter months never even occurred to us, but here in the Pacific Northwest that is something we need to do.  At least in our small house with limited closet and dresser space, we don't have room to keep our summer clothes in the closet all winter, or our winter clothes handy all summer.  But you may not need to do this sort of thing, so you can update some of those steps to suit your needs.  We also do things here like put our patio toys and umbrellas away, empty our fountains, put away bikes.  So it makes sense for us to have certain points of the year where the major organizing task is switching over seasonal items - sports & play gear, clothing, coats & hats, etc.  I've tried to think through other times of the year and what needs to be done - organizing the office and tax papers in February, school supplies in August, kids clothes in September, toys in December - and then the other random things have just been spread out throughout the year during the months that don't have a specific seasonal task.

So join in with me if you like, let me know how your doing, check up and keep me honest to see if I'm holding up my end of the bargain!