This is the third article of the series "Why I can't clean my house?", and in this article, I would like to share some tips on how to organize things inside the shelf.
The skill to organize things on a shelf is very important to clean your house.
If you put so many things randomly on a shelf and if inside yourself is not organized well, it doesn't mean you have cleaned your house or room.
I have my own method for organizing things on a shelf so I would like to share tips on it.
Let's jump into it.
Summary of Part1 & 2
The links to previous articles are as below
"Why I can't clean my house? Part 2: the ultimate shopping method for minimalism"
Let's quickly summarise the content of part 1 and part 2.
In part one article, I have shared tips on the procedure of cleaning your house and those steps are...
- Know what you have
- Know where you have
- Know if you need it or not
- Decide your cleaning time
- JUST DO IT
In part 2 article, I have shared the ultimate shopping rule "One Two Rule".
One Two Rule is the shopping rule that you should follow if you want to decrease the number of things you have and also if you want to clean your house.
The rule is very simple; if you purchase or get one new thing, you have to give two things away from your house either by throwing them away or by donating.
Now it's time to move on to the third step of cleaning a house "How to organize things on a shelf".
Definition of Organise
Before going to the concrete tips, I would like to go take a look at the definition of "organized" in terms of cleaning.
In my personal opinion, organized means "one genre one box"
This means that it is better to put things of the same genre into one same box together so that you don't lose and you don't need to take a lot of time searching for one specific genre.
How you categorize things depends on how many things you have in one category.
Let's say you have one sweater, five T-shirts, five socks, and five pairs of underwear.
In this situation, you seem to have quite a few amounts of clothes, so you can make the category "Clothes" because it will not take too much space to organize "Clothes" for you.
However in case you have 20 or 30 T-shirts with you, probably making the category "T-shirts" is better.
The point here is when you open the box, everything in the box has to be easily found, so putting many things in a box and putting the boxes on a shelf isn't cleaning.
By the way according to the data provided by a blog article from IKEA, we seem to spend 5,000 hours searching for things around the house in our life.
5,000 hours...
What do you think if you can space up these 5,000 hours in your life?
How to Organise boxes on a shelf
When you have managed to do one general one-box rule, the next thing you have to work on is how to organize the boxes on a shelf.
How to organize the boxes on a shelf is very simple.
Let's say you have the boxes of categories A, B, C, and D.
My advice is do want to put the boxes of similar categories close by.
Another tip that helps you to organize things on a shelf is that you can also put some marks or signs on the boxes.
For example, you can write the category name on the outer side of the box, or you can prepare the different colors of the boxes and you can allocate each color to each category.
Color is one of the easiest triggers to detect things
By doing this you'll have a very organized shelf with organized boxes inside.
Isn't this beautiful and easy to do?
Summary of the Content
Now let's summarise the content of this article.
The third article of "Why I can't clean my house?" series was all about organizing the shelf and the boxes in the shelf.
If you follow "One Genre One Box" which requires you to use the boxes to organize things and a box can only contain one genre.
If your house is totally messy and if you want to work on cleaning, I am here to help you motivate your cleaning.
If you have any questions about the rules that I have shared, please leave comments down below.