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Change your home's flow: Back-to-school organization
Your home is not meant to only store your belongings – or even to display your personal style. Turning a house into your home often has as much to do with how you live in it as it does what color the walls or exterior trim are painted.
How a home flows – how you move through the rooms and live in it – is often contingent on its layout, but if you find yourself spending 15 minutes searching for keys in the morning or figuring out what to wear, some small tweaks may help your home flow more smoothly – and potentially even save you those precious few minutes in the morning.
Making small adjustments to your home's flow could mean outfitting your garage to better arrange your fishing gear or adding drawers to store crafting supplies. However, since a new school year is right around the corner for coastal Alabama, below are a few organizational tips that may help you streamline the flow of your home in some areas that tend to become chaotic during the school year—but are useful year-round!
Your Command Center
How can you keep the kids organized for school without an organizational command center for yourself? The idea is to keep all of your go-to info in one set area. For most, this means some combination of calendars, dry erase boards, bulletin boards and hanging folder holders to keep appointments, school lunch schedules and permission slips all in an easily accessible place for you. It doesn't have to be just for school either. This would be a great place to keep keys, grocery lists, dinner schedules and bills that need to be paid if you have the space.
Getting Ready
While it might not be much help actually getting your children out of bed, you can use the flow of your house to guide them toward getting out the door on time once their feet hit the floor. Have their clothes laid out for the week in hanging cubbies in the closet. Keep the belts, socks and even shoes they'll wear there, too, in order to cut down on not being able to find a matching sock come time to hit the road. Group everything they need to get ready for school in the morning on one shelf in the bathroom. Bonus points for arranging it chronologically. The more the layout of your home can match their routine, the more likely you are to make it before the first school bell.
By the Door
If your home looks anything like most, everything is dumped by the door as soon as the kids get home from school. Depending on if you have a closet to use and how many bags are involved every day, you can use hooks and a bench to anchor your entry way and try to manage the clutter. Another option involves using a cabinet or bench with cabinets to hide bookbags, football gear and ballet shoes. You can even it turn it into a grab-and-go charging station by keeping everyone's chargers labeled in the cabinet. This would also be the place to keep a chalk board or dry erase board to keep reminders for the kids (from your command center) as they run out the door.
Even making tiny adjustments to where things are stored or how they are arranged can equal big time saving impacts on your home's flow. Let's start this school year off right!
