If you’ve ever walked into your living room and immediately tripped over a pile of toys, lost your newspaper under a school bag or struggled to find your car keys because of a mountain of other debris then it’s time for you to get organized. The living room is the heart of the home, and with the right storage solutions in place you can turn it from a chaotic clutter den into a tranquil and calming environment. Once you’ve got your organizational systems in place you’ll be able to sit back, relax, and enjoy spending time on your sofa watching movies or even the sports channel in peace. Organizing your living room is easy, and will take no time at all if you have the right tools. But where do you start?
A Place for Everything
The phrase "a place for everything and everything in its place" has never been more apt than when you’re organizing your living room. And this is doubly true if you have kids! The main areas you need to tackle if you want to reorganize your living room are organizing your multimedia, clearing the miscellaneous clutter, and making sure you have enough storage available to hide away everything that accumulates in your living room over the course of a normal week. Organizing all of the essentials your kids tend to leave lying around is an important step in reclaiming your living room from the clutches of organizational chaos. Start by investing in a book case or other shelving unit, then buy storage boxes or storage baskets to place on it. Allocate one basket to each child (either by assigning them their own basket color or even by putting labels on the baskets) and ask that they place their school books, toys, and any other clutter they leave lying around in their basket before they go to bed every night.
The Multimedia Headache
For most people the living room is a place to relax and unwind; watch a movie, listen to music and play computer games. With all this fun activity comes a host of expensive equipment and a small mountain of DVDs, CDs and even records too. Storing these properly will immediately make your living room look cleaner, more streamlined and more spacious too. Invest in a CD tower and record storage system for your music collections. Shelves full of storage boxes are perfect for keeping DVDs tidy and organized. And don’t forget to buy a TV unit to keep your television, DVD player and games consoles out of harm’s way too; remember that if this is a cupboard system that hides this equipment from view then this will prove a deterrent to any opportunistic thief. It might be wise to consider how you will protect this equipment from theft or even accidental damage: if you add up the value of your multimedia center you’re likely to be surprised by just how much it would cost to replace!
Do you Really Need it?
Quite often people are reluctant to throw away things once they’ve come into their home. But if you don’t regularly purge your home of clutter you will find you have so much stuff in your living room even adding an extra storage unit won’t contain it! At least every six months you should have a deep clean in your living room and throw away anything you don’t like, don’t need, or no longer have a use for. Remember to buy a waste paper bin and put it in your living room too: your family will be more likely to throw away any rubbish in your living room if the bin is close to hand. Finally, why not consider zoning your living room? Creating separate areas for reading, watching TV or simply relaxing will ensure your living room works for every member of the family and you can all focus on your individual interests whilst spending time together. Having a quiet reading area in the living room, for example, means your children could study or enjoy a book whilst you are close by playing a computer game, which in turn will help encourage family time. Once your living room has been well organized you’ll find you enjoy spending time in it much more, and your family will be enriched as a result.
Written by: Julie Clifford
