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Front Room and Foyer Organization

Your foyer or front room closet can be very useful, but it often is overstuffed. There are some daily items that need to be kept near the front door. It can be difficult to keep this heavily traffic area clear and neat.

Take a look at your entrance and figure out what your biggest problems are. It may be coats, umbrellas, backpacks, papers, pocket contents, and more. Coats are often a problem because you want to drop them as soon as you come in the house. If you don’t have a closet nearby, then the problem can get worse very quickly.

To solve the problem with coats, you can install a hanging bar from the wall. You can create an attractive hanging area out of a dowel rod and two brackets or purchase a prefabricated hanging rod. You can finish and decorate this bar however you would like. Use decorative clothing hangers to keep the area from looking nice. Another option would be to use hooks. Make sure that you buy hooks large enough to hold your biggest coats. If you have tailored coats, they should be hung on wood hangers or coat hangers shaped to fit their design, or you may risk damage to the garment.

Another common problem in the entry area is mail and other papers. You probably enter the house with mail, paperwork or school work fairly often. A lot of these paper products can be put into the trash. Too often we simply lay the stack down to free up our hands for taking off coats, putting food away, or taking care of what is most important. You can take care of this clutter problem by using organizers designed for sorting, putting a trash receptacle near the door or even keeping a shredder nearby. Hide it in a cabinet so that it is not an added source of clutter for your foyer. When you enter the house, throw the most important items into one bin, things that you won’t need until later in another, shred personal mail, and throw away what you can, all within a few seconds of opening the door.

Most of us empty our pockets when we come into the door. It is helpful to keep cell phones, wallets, keys, change, and purses near the entryway so that we can easily find them the next time we leave the house. Make sure that you have specific places for everything. Hooks for bags, a charging area for cell phones, and a container for change. When you’re ready to leave the house, everything you need will be neatly contained instead of being lost in all of the clutter.

You can use hooks, clothes hangers, wooden hangers, a cabinet or desk, or whatever you need to help keep your foyer organized. When everything has a place to go, your entry area will run more smoothly and your home will become less cluttered.

About the Author: Charlie Hafter is on the staff of Closet Hanger Factory, a leading online resource for clothes hangers. Get all of the closet and clothes hanger accessories you could need at http://www.closethangerfactory.com, which is recognized worldwide for their excellent quality hangers.

Staying Organized for Life

Getting organized is possible, but staying that way is easier another story. When done with your habits in mind, organizing keeps things from becoming disorganized in the future. You need to have a place for everything, with categories, and you have a maintenance plan for the area. Use these ideas to organize in a way that helps you to keep things orderly now and in the future.

Make a place for everything that’s convenient, big enough to accommodate new things coming in, and that is memorable. It’s impossible to keep rubber bands in their place if their place is one of 50 tiny drawers in an organizer upstairs in the craft room. Categorizing and choosing a place near where you use each item can help.

To get things categorized, it is best to pull everything out where you can see it while you clean. Put things into categories as you pull them out. Cut down on clutter by creating trash, donate, and maybe piles. Get rid of what you can while you’re in there. Then, start to evaluate your categories.

Some categories may be too big to be easily organized. Break it down so that you can specify a storage space for each sub-category of stuff. For example, if you have “crafts” all together, you may realize that you would need an entire room dedicated to them to keep them in the same category. However, if you divided them into sewing, yarn crafts, art, photography, scrapbooking, and cake decorating, you might be able to split them up.

Make your everyday items that you use the most really easy to access. People tend to slack off on organizing if they don’t feel like going all the way across the house to use the rack that you set up for shoes. Make sure that the organization of something is very near to where you use it and you’ll notice a big difference.

If it’s difficult to reach, retrieve, fill, reseal, and replace the storage containers that you chose, then you’re not likely to use them. Go for simple solutions, like specialty clothes hangers, that allow you to save space, making room for shelves with easy-to-access baskets. You should be able to throw laundry into each basket with one hand so that it’s easy to go from room to room putting clothes away. Using the right hangers makes closets big enough to stay organized in this way.

About the Author: Charlie Hafter is on the staff of Closet Hanger Factory, a leading online resource for clothes hangers. Get all of the closet and clothes hanger accessories you could need at http://www.closethangerfactory.com, which is recognized worldwide for their excellent quality hangers.