Even the best of us insanely organized people sometimes end up with clutter in our homes.  My favorite way to combat clutter? TOO.  Yup, TOO or “Touch Only Once.” This method basically entails dealing with items immediately.  For instance, when you get the mail, don’t bring it in and set it on your kitchen table; touch it only once–immediately, take it into your office or throw in the recycling bin.  When you take clothes out of the dryer, don’t put them on your dining room table or bed. Immediately fold them and put them away.  When you go the store don’t put leave your shopping bag full of clothes in the living room.  Take the clothes upstairs right away and put on hangers in your closet.  By utilizing the Touch Only Once method, you’ll spend a few more seconds now dealing with your stuff, but you’ll save yourself a lot of time later from running around your house trying to put things away and decipher what needs to be done with an item.  Let me know how this works for you!

So I’ve been itching to do some organizing down in the Man Cave for quite some time now.  We have this wall of cabinets, which is awesome…but in the year and a half we’ve lived in our house, they’ve gotten a bit out of control, and a lot of the neatly organized and labeled bins were still nicely labels, but they held things we didn’t use or even need!  So this weekend, I begged my hubby to sit down with me and go through some things. This is what it looked like at approximatly 3:00pm on Sunday:

Anytime I’m doing serious organizing, whether it be a room, a garage, or a jewelry box…I start by taking everything out.  This may seem a bit counterintuitive, but it is actually an essential step.  Seeing all the items you own out in front of you allows you to see for yourself exactly what you have–you can then ask yourself “Do I really need this?”, “Do I use this?”, “Is there another place or way to store this item that may be more effective?”.  This is the hard part!  But once you take the time to ask yourself all these questions, and then act on your decisions, putting things away in nicely labeled bins seems like a walk in the park!  And after a day of organizing and uncluttering, this is what those cabinets look like now:

With room to grow…

I’m pretty excited!  We got rid of a lot of outdated electronics, outdated, and things that we just don’t need!  I took all the camera equipment out of those little bins in the first picture and put them in those larger bins with no lids.  Now that I’m blogging, I use the camera almost every day, and I needed to have a place where the camera stuff could be contained, but where I wouldn’t have to mess with lids and such every time I got the camera out!  I also had all our linens jammed in a cabinet half the size of the one they are in now.  I realized it just wasn’t working!  What isn’t working for you in YOUR house? Don’t just sit there…GO FIX IT!

P.S. Please don’t judge the decor in the Man Cave…it’s the next big room I have to tackle in my adventures in decorating…until then, we’re trying to make do with what we have!