How many times have you looked at mag­a­zines and found all of the neat lit­tle prod­ucts that help to orga­nize your home and thought, “I could be orga­nized if I had this, but I can’t afford it?”

Every­one at one point or another has thought this way. The true reac­tion of any­one want­ing to be orga­nized, look­ing for a way to get all of their belong­ings under con­trol and some­one that really cares what their home looks like.

I just thought that I would let you know that you can afford to be orga­nized! Sure, it would be nice to have all of the cut­sey things and the match­ing con­tain­ers and all of the nice divider con­tain­ers, but it isn’t nec­es­sary in order for orga­ni­za­tion to take place.

The best way to get orga­nized and to stay that way is to take your time, use what you already have or pur­chase the min­i­mal items that you need and then eval­u­ate what you would like to use to per­ma­nently orga­nize it.

I have had peo­ple go through count­less dif­fer­ent sizes of Rub­ber­maid con­tain­ers just to find out that they didn’t need half of what they bought and now they have to fig­ure out how to orga­nize the con­tain­ers. Sure seems like a long way around to achieve an objec­tive, espe­cially when the objec­tive is to orga­nize and save money.

Let’s just take a linen closet as an exam­ple; we want to orga­nize every­thing accord­ing to item and size. We have tow­els, sheets, table­cloths, doilies and blan­kets in our closet that are falling off of the shelves. Gosh, where do we start. It’s a mess and it is impos­si­ble to see how it is going to look any bet­ter with­out spend­ing a lot of money. You are wrong!!

First, we need to take every­thing out of the closet and put it in ‘like’ piles. What are ‘like’ items? Let’s start with the sheets; we have 4 sets of Full Size Sheets and 4 sets of Twin Size Sheets, so now we know that we need 2 boxes big enough to hold 4 sets of sheets each. Now that wasn’t so hard was it?

We have 6 Bath size Tow­els, 6 wash­cloths to match and 3 fin­ger tip tow­els. It doesn’t make sense to sep­a­rate the sizes of the tow­els and we don’t have enough of one kind to make sets, so we need two boxes. One to hold 6 Bath tow­els with match­ing wash­cloths and another to hold 3 fin­ger­tips tow­els that we can buy big enough to store extra dish­tow­els in. So at this point, we need four boxes.

Next, we need a box for the table­cloths and one for the doilies and some­thing that is big enough to store the blan­kets in. This is where you are going to make your one and only pur­chase; buy a vac­uum bag large enough to hold all four blan­kets. Put the blan­kets in the bag, attach the vac­uum hose and pull the air out. Now you should have a small enough con­tainer that it will fit just right on that shelf.

Go to the gro­cery store and get 6 boxes that are about the size that 1 gal­lon bleach bot­tles come in. This will be plenty big for your project. If you feel you want to dec­o­rate the boxes, you can use gift wrap­ping paper, comics from the news­pa­per, con­tact paper or plas­tic throw away table­cloths for wrap­ping them.

Now put a paper label on it to make sure that you know what is inside by just stand­ing back and look­ing at the boxes. You would write the labels such as; Full Size Sheets, Twin Size Sheets, Bath & Wash­cloths, Fin­ger­tips & Dish Tow­els, Table­cloths, and Doilies. The blan­kets you don’t have to label because they are in a clear see-thru container.

Can you pic­ture how great this is going to look when you are fin­ished and it really didn’t cost you a lot of money either!

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