The suns out, the breeze is cool – I’m ready to let the fresh air inside and fill my house with fresh flowers! For me, ‘spring greening’ starts with creating a healthy, clean home environment and with the gorgeous spring weather, it’s the perfect excuse to organize my home.
We are cleaning out the carport, sorting through outdated clothes in our closets and organizing my home office. In this post, I’m sharing my tips to help you start your own spring greening process!
Create Home Zones
The first thing you need to do is divide your home into ZONES – your bedroom, office, kitchen, bathroom, garage and sun room. Once you know what zones you need to tackle, you can work through each area separately, so you won’t feel overwhelmed.
Organize With Storage Bins
Before you start organizing, I recommend that you get 3 storage bins: Bin 1 is for anything you want to get rid of, Bin 2 is for anything that you can repair, and Bin 3 is for things to be moved to another place in your home. You could also use some bins to start categorizing your items. For example, I’m finding extra holiday decorating items (Christmas, Halloween) that didn’t get put away. This is a good opportunity to start some new bins for upcoming holidays such as Easter decorations as well.
Organize Your Closet
As I’m preparing for our move and spring cleaning, I decided to start with cleaning out my closet. It felt wonderful to get rid of outdated clothes that no longer fit and make room for some new pieces in my wardrobe. I will admit it was hard to get rid of expensive items that I purchased with my hard-earned money, but I no longer had a need for these items. You can sell your clothes on apps such as Poshmark, but I opted to donate everything to charity.
You could also take it a step further and invest in a closet organization system. I love IKEA for all their affordable options, and this is something we will be shopping for at our new house!
Organize Your Home Office
My home office was overflowing with books for female entrepreneurs and binders that were full of notes I thought I would need again “someday.” It’s been years and I haven’t looked at them, so I put them in my bin of items to get rid of. The next thing I did was go through all my extra pens and highlighters and get rid of the ones that no longer worked.
This year, I’m focusing on my office design and it will be wonderful to start the design process with reduced clutter to manage.
Organize Your Kitchen
My kitchen cupboards were full of mismatched coffee cups and over-sized pans! I have a little problem with buying all the pretty mugs I see at HomeSense! I packed up all our old mugs and we are bringing some of these to our cabin and donating the rest. As a next step, I will be getting rid of our chipped dish set and investing in a brand-new set of dishes. Our kitchen drawers were overflowing with dish clothes and towels, so this was also a good opportunity to donate the extra ones.
We’re also starting to plan our kitchen renovation and we are considering looking at Ikea as they have some very modern designs. Would you recommend an Ikea kitchen or another place?
Organize Your Bathroom
I’m embarrassed to admit how many beauty products I own, but they are essentials right!? When organizing my bathroom, I started with the top of the vanity and moved everything that I need to use up before we move to the front. Everything that I haven’t opened yet, I moved to a box inside the bottom of the vanity. Everything that is extra stock, such as shampoo I bought on sale, I moved to another box to store in our downstairs bathroom.
Organize Your Garage/ Carport
Over the years our backyard carport has become the “graveyard” for everything we wanted to move out of our house (all that extra furniture we’ve accumulated and can’t seem to part with!). The first thing we did when organizing our carport was to get rid of anything that was beyond repair. Next, we purchased some new bins from Lowe’s and some labels from Staples to organize the smaller items. We are also looking at storage shelves to maximize space.
Organize Your Sun Room
With all this sunshine, my son is asking me daily if our strawberries are growing yet! While it’s not quite strawberry growing weather, I am starting to add some fresh florals inside my home and getting our garden ready for planting.
Our sun room has been a great addition to our home and I’m excited to share that our new home also has a sun room! Although it’s become a combination of sun room/ playroom, a sun room is a wonderful four-season room that can be enjoyed year-round.
As it turns out, there is a variety of ways you can organize your sun room when you are spring greening. The first thing I did was get all my plants positioned and clean-up my table and chairs for the spring. Next, I washed my white curtains so that they would feel fresh. Finally, I purchased some new bins for my sons toys so he could play while I relax after all that time spent organizing!
Talia Beckett Davis is the Founder of the Organization of American Women in Public Relations and the Organization of Canadian Women in Public Relations. She has worked with some of the largest brands in North America at her PR agency Pink Pearl PR to help them get featured in high profile media outlets and grow their sales.