Make your bed part II...

I forgot another tip I hadn't tried before, but thought it was a really good idea and I want to do it.

Turn all of your clothes hanging in your closet so the hanger is reversed with the crooked loop over the bar backwards... then as you wear your clothes and put them back away, hang them the regular way and in six months or a year you can see very clearly what you are not wearing and can donate it.

I have been changing out my fall/winter and spring/summer clothes twice a year since 2003 and I LOVE it! I have big sealed bins that I pack the off season clothes in... and when it's time to change them over I pull them out of the garage and put them in my bedroom, I pull everything out of my closet and lay it on my bed and then pull out the clothes from the bins and hang them up... then I sort through the things I have taken out of the closet and pack away for next year, or donate if I am not wearing it.

It's like Christmas to pull out those clothes I haven't looked at for 6 months... and it makes me go through my clothes and keep them cleaned out.... I wasn't good at donating clothes before, but when I pack them and hang then and unpack them and re hang them so many times and have never worn them... it made me much much better at letting go of stuff I wasn't wearing season after season. It's especially fun if I have lost weight... then I add trying things on as I unpack them. I have actually gone from 6 big huge bins down to 3 now... and life is so much easier and I have much less stress getting dressed everyday since I have been doing this.

I just started packing up my seasonal shoes too, since I have more room in the bins and less shoes to move now.

Less is definitely more!! Having too many clothes was such a heavy burden to me and I would have never realized that or believed anyone who told me until I started this process.

Make your bed...

Last night we had a young women activity on organization and time management.

What a great topic.

A couple of things resonated with me...

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1. Everything has to have a home... if you bring in something new it has to have a home.

I have a pile of things from the Trek like bug spray etc that I don't normally buy, so it is still in a pile to be put away. I guess it would go with the camping stuff, but most of our camping stuff is big and bulky on a shelf, the smaller stuff is in a bin and it is cooking stuff, so I didn't want to put bug spray in that bin, yuk. So this pile of clutter that has been sitting there for 3 weeks because it never got a home. My bad.

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2. When you take off your clothes, MAKE A DECISION. It's either clean or dirty... clean clothes hang up, dirty ones go in the laundry basket. I have "a chair" that collects clothes I take off, that can really be worn again. But I lay them in the chair in my bedroom and then it ends up being a pile in the chair that I dread going through. They need to be hung up, it is this big ol' heavy burden of chore that I HAVE to get done... eventually I have enough and go deal with it... and find that my strong silent mysterious man has laid a pair of socks, or a dirty work shirt on the pile at some point... at which when I find that - EVERYTHING MUST BE WASHED! Yuk.

(Apparently I never shared with him the rules of the chair.)

Also, I can't use the chair for sitting and reading because it is always holding "maybe" clothes.

So make a decision... clean? hang it up, dirty? laundry basket.

This tip will make a difference for my messy room.

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3. Another way to make your room look neater... MAKE YOUR BED!

I have to admit, I was one of those teenagers that had the mindset "Why? I am just going to get back into again". And that kind of stuck and I still have issues with making my bed. I actually don't buy top sheets, we only have a fitted sheet and a comforter (maybe a blanket in the winter sometimes if it's really really cold now that we are having to kick the dogs out of the bed). It was too much trouble to make up the bed (the one I don't make up) with a sheet on it. (I know, how bad is that?)

But I will admit, after being able to work from home and spending time in my home during the day... when I make my bed, it does feel really nice to have a neat made up bed. When I walk back through my room during the day, it looks so neat and clean when the bed is made. It makes a difference, really.

Surprisingly there were about 131,000,000 results when I googled "make your bed"... all kinds of tips on how to make a bed, who knew??? Like a top class hotel, in 30 seconds or less, in easy steps, videos on how to make your bed... wow, I love the Internet!!

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So for the new school year (since I don't have to buy school supplies or go clothes shopping this year... so weird and bittersweet) I have made a commitment to make my bed each day :)