Organize Your Life Day 13: Bedrooms

Keeping the bedrooms clean used to be a real battle, but something amazing has happened at our house. The boys’ bedroom has stayed clean for weeks, and I haven’t nagged a single time. Here are the steps you can use to get and keep your bedrooms clean.

Welcome to Organize Your Life Day 13: Bedrooms.

This is part of a mini-series on overcoming parenting (and life!) overwhelm and stress by organizing your life. Click here to see the introduction and links to other days.

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It used to take nagging, hand holding, and a lot of time for us to get the bedrooms clean around here. Even then, they would lapse between cleaning sessions.

However, as I sat down to write this post, I realized that I haven’t been involved in cleaning the boys’ bedroom for quite a while. What a wonderful realization that was!

I have learned that life with kids is always presenting new and interesting stages. So if this glorious “clean bedroom stage” doesn’t last forever, I won’t be shocked. However, we’re going to enjoy it while we can!

And in the meantime, I’m going to share how our bedrooms got organized and have stayed that way with minimal effort. I hope it helps eliminate some of your parenting overwhelm.

Pull out your Workbook or journal to Organize Your Life Day 13: Bedrooms. As you read the post, record any notes or tips you want to remember.

The Groundwork

Over the past week, we have accomplished a lot in regards to organizing our homes. Many of those efforts lay the groundwork for keeping our bedrooms organized. On Day 9 we covered the basic principles of organizing any space: simplify, organize, and systematize (SOS). We specifically targeted clothes, toys, and cleaning, which all aid the bedroom battle.

However, you may just be joining, or you might not have had time to get to all the bedrooms.  Today we’ll pull everything together and put on the finishing touches, so that your bedrooms (and their maintenance) elicit calm.

1. Simplify

One of the biggest challenges to keeping our bedrooms clean was that we had more stuff than space. We’ll talk about maximizing space, but we couldn’t really add more space. So the answer was where we ought to always begin when we organize: simplify. We went through everything in the bedrooms and passed on as much as the kids were willing to give. Some of it moved to family collections and other things were donated.

As we limit the amount of stuff we have, we make it easier to maintain our homes. More importantly, we draw focus from possessions to (hopefully) people, relationships, and the things that matter most.

Here are a few places to start when simplifying bedrooms.

• If you haven’t already, go through your clothes. We covered a lot of useful information for this on Day 7. In general, only keep what you actually like and wear. A smaller wardrobe you love is better than a large one you tolerate. If you can’t fit it all, rotate items seasonally through other storage space, or, ideally, take another look at what you can pass on.
• Again, if you didn’t get to it yesterday, pare down the toys stored in bedrooms. Read Day 12 for useful tips.
• If you have a desk or office corner in your bedroom, apply your paperwork simplification there that we covered on Day 11.
• Give away jewelry that you never wear.
• Address the random piles of stuff in your bedroom. (Don’t we all have those?) Decide if you can get rid of these items or if they just need a set place to live.

2. Organize

After we decided that we wanted to keep everything that was left in the bedrooms, we were ready to figure out how best to store it all. Although all three questions guiding user-friendly organization apply here, bedrooms need special emphasis on the third question: How often are you using it?

Reserve prime real estate for those things you use most often. Prime real estate in the bedroom includes desk space, drawers, free standing shelves, nightstands, and the part of the closet that is easy to reach.

Not so prime real estate includes the shelf in the top of the closet, the other parts of the closet that are hard to reach, and under the bed.

Shift things around until everything has a home that is user-friendly. If toys are too hard to put away, they probably won’t make it.

Here are a few tips for organizing bedrooms.

• Nightstands clutter quicker than other spaces. Keep the list of items that are supposed to live there very short. Most likely only a lamp, clock, and book should be on the nightstand. The more that lives there, the easier it is to not notice the clutter gather.
• Make creative use of closet space with hooks, shelves, and stacking drawers. These are especially useful in kids closets where the clothes don’t reach the floor.
• Contain shoes in a box and file them toe down to conserve space and keep easy access. (This doesn’t work with boots, but it’s great for sandals, athletic shoes, and flats.)
• Imagine the space under the bed as a Monster. The only things safe from the clutches of this dust-bunny collecting, never see it again Monster are those items kept in under the bed bins. Easily slide the bins out to access possessions and clean under the bed. Without this rule, that Monster becomes a catch-all of cavernous proportions.
• Read more tips about organizing clothes and toys.

3. Systematize

After we made nice, user-friendly homes for everything in the bedrooms, it would have been great if it all just stayed that way! Unfortunately, that’s not the way living works. We had to make and implement a plan or system for keeping the rooms orderly.

Here is our system for keeping bedrooms organized.

• We are each responsible for our own bedroom. By the weekend, the bedrooms need to be clean. This includes toys picked up, desks and dressers clear, floors swept or vacuumed, and garbage emptied.
• This needs to be completed before any play happens on Saturday.

The Truth About Our Routine

We’ve talked a lot about routines this week because they work!

Now the truth about routines is that more often than not, they don’t work overnight. Especially when we throw kids and other people with agency into those routines. It does take time for everyone to learn, practice, and master what they are supposed to do.

There were some Saturdays we spent a lot of time working in the bedrooms together, cleaning a week’s worth of accumulated mess. Then we moved to the kids cleaning without my help, and some weeks that seemed to take forever and often included bickering between the room sharers. Yuck!

However, we didn’t miss a week. It was never a question whether the job needed to be done or not. Occasionally, I’d mention how easy it would be if we cleaned up as we went during the week. As daily clean-up wasn’t part of the routine, (and purposefully because I didn’t want to nag or fight it everyday) I never pushed it. Instead, at one point, it clicked for each of the kids. After missing out on play time on their weekend, they realized that yes, it would be easier to clean as we go. So they started doing it independently.

Suddenly, Mommy Motivated Saturday Slave Away became Kid Led Saturday Spiffy Up.

Each of our kids reached the point of “Our routine is working!” at different times and with different amounts of struggle. That is real life. However, if the routine is set-up to actually produce the desired result and we are CONSISTENT with the routine, we WILL see progress. And remember, we are focusing on progress in life, not perfection.

Hang in there when it feels like it’s not working. Choose patience, and be persistent. You will get there.

The miracle of our clean bedrooms is a testament to the power of routine.

A Final Word about Clutter

As this is the final day that covers organizing our space in this series, let’s chat one last minute about clutter.

I believe humans have an inherent desire to create order out of chaos. When we can’t or don’t create that order, it doesn’t sit well with us. We are more easily distracted, stressed, and annoyed. These are some of the negative results of clutter, and our bedrooms can clutter with the best of them. However, as you apply SOS to your bedroom, the clutter will vanish.

Remember our three causes of clutter and how SOS solves them.

1. You don’t actually want the stuff making the clutter, so it just sits there. (Simplify)
2. The clutter doesn’t have a home. (Organize)
3. Someone didn’t put the clutter in its home. (Systematize)

If you notice a pile stacking up, ask yourself why. Which cause applies here? You have the SOS skills to revisit and solve that cluttering problem.

Your Turn

In your Workbook or journal, write how you will keep your bedroom organized and encourage your kids to do the same.

Set your timer for the remainder of your hour. Pick a bedroom and hit it hard. Simplify first, then organize, and last, throughout the coming weeks, consistently apply your chosen system for maintenance.

When you are done for the day, record any thoughts, take-aways, or future action items.

May your bedrooms be organized and your nagging eliminated!

Please share any questions, thoughts, or breakthroughs in the comments.

Tomorrow is the last day of this series! I hope it’s a great wrap-up for all the work you’ve done over the past two weeks. Looking forward to Organize Your Life Day 14: Organize Your Future.

A fun read to go along with today’s endeavors…

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