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It’s that time of year: secret holiday gifts are starting to pile up in bizarre places around the house, you’re almost too busy to write in your own planner, and getting organized is starting to feel like a 2023 problem. Luckily, this week’s episode of The Everygirl Podcast will save you from being buried in clutter until the new year, because The Home Edit’s Joanna Teplin and Clea Shearer are sharing all of their secrets for home organization. If you’ve somehow missed their hit Netflix show, Clea and Joanna are the dynamic co-founders of the wildly successful home organization company, The Home Edit (they’ve also organized Reese Witherspoon’s closet–no big deal).
Whether you’ve been dreaming of getting organized for years now, or you just want to make sure you can still find your keys and wallet when you leave the house during the last months of 2022, Clea and Joanna have tips for anything and everything organization. Read on for The Home Edit’s top three tips for organizing your home this season, and check out this week’s episode of The Everygirl Podcast for more.
1. Start editing your items, and start small
Making the commitment to get a space in your home organized is one thing, but actually doing it is a whole other beast. Clea and Joanna’s first recommendation for anyone feeling overwhelmed by organizing is to start by editing your items. This means getting rid of anything you don’t want or need anymore before you do anything else—you can’t move on to containing or labeling your things until you know exactly what you want to keep. “The edit is the most important part of the organizing process,” Clea said. “All it takes is a decisive attitude.”
If the prospect of getting started with your organization is still daunting, Clea and Joanna recommend starting with as small a space as possible. You can kick off your cleaning just by editing a single desk drawer, or one cupboard in your kitchen. Narrowing your edit down to a bite-sized chunk will help you feel even more confident in your decision making over what to keep and what to toss. Plus, chances are, getting started with something small like a single drawer will motivate you even more to move on to the next one.
2. Categorize, contain, and label
Once you’ve gotten your space edited, you can get started with the most fun parts of home organization: categorizing, containing, and labeling. Editing and categorizing before doing anything else will show you the best possible way for you to organize a given space: it will show you if you have a few too many duplicates of one thing (it may actually be possible to own too many pairs of black boots, unfortunately). Then comes the long-awaited shopping trip to buy all the fun organizational products that will make your life easier—drawers and boxes and baskets, oh my! If you want to have a closet à la The Home Edit, check out their collection at the Container Store.
On The Everygirl Podcast, Clea and Joanna emphasize that having a clear labeling system is the best way to make sure that your organizational system works for you over time. “Labeling is a set of instructions that lets you know where to find things, and where to put them away,” Clea said. “It’s helpful for the rest of the household too.” These labels are not only limited to words and phrases; they can be visual cues too. Clea and Joanna are big fans of organizing in a color-coded rainbow.
3. Be honest with yourself about the “fussy factor”
Going through all of these steps and creating a beautifully organized space is a wonderful feeling, but at the end of the day, your organization has to be functional, too. Are you really going to want to come home from the grocery store and put all of your cereal in gorgeous glass jars on your countertop? If that’s you, then totally go for it, but there’s nothing wrong with creating systems that are lower-maintenance. “There are different levels of what we call a ‘fussy factor,’” Joanna said. “You want to be honest with yourself about how fussy you want your space to be, and what you want to put into continuing to keep it up.”
The Home Edit has partnered with Abbott to help people organize their homes and get prepared with wellness essentials, such as BinaxNOW COVID tests.
