Your Living Space can be Organized and have Decorator Style As Well

Perhaps you've seen photos of "decluttered" spaces in books which look very empty and thought "I don’t want to live in a depressing home like that!"

But a well-organized house doesn't have to be boring. Home organization doesn't require a specific look. Decluttering your home is about disposing of all the junk that you don’t need, don’t want and don’t like. You keep the items you need, use and love. Getting your home organized means being able to simply and quickly find the posessions you’ve decided to keep every time you need them. Neither requires a specific decorating look – so you can make your decluttered and organized space look just as decorated as you wish.

Storage doesn't have to be behind closed doors, although you'll probably want at least some of it to be so. It’s a good idea to mix open and closed storage so that you can contrast a visually uncluttered area of closed doors (hiding the needed but possibly ugly objects) with a more exciting visual feast of open shelving displaying collections and objects.

If you’re someone who likes to see everything "out", that’s fine too. Just be aware of how things look when you acquire them, even very ordinary objects like food packets. If you have the choice, buy things which are beautiful and even color-matched as well as functional.

Even a very random mix of ordinary items can look organized if you impose order on them by the way you store them. Matching open wall units which cover a large area, especially if the shelving itself is unusual in color or design, can impose an ordered grid on the objects stored in it. The tighter the shelving grid, the more organized it will look. Repeating the shelving style within the same room, or throughout the house, gives a more cohesive look.

One important element is to include display space for things you love to look at. These can be displayed in groups, or singly with space around them so that each individual object stands out as something worthy of attention. Rotating objects on display makes each one more special, too: you never get so used to seeing it that you become blind to it.

While we enjoy seeing the items we like, there are other objects we don’t need to see and which often make a space look disorganized. Some of the worst offenders here are power and data cables, in their many variations. If you’re redesigning a room completely, try to design in concealment from the beginning – for example, you could use hollow baseboard systems which act as wiring channels all around the room. There are many other methods which will work, too. If you’re simply redecorating an existing room, take every opportunity to hide wires inside furniture and use cable clamps to corral the spaghetti of cables around so many media or computer systems. It's a good idea to keep power and data cables apart if you can, as the fields around power cables can interfere with data.

A good way of checking how you’re getting on is to snap photos of the space. Our eyes and minds are very good at "editing out" things we don’t want to see, but a picture shows the unedited version of how things really appear. Keep arranging and checking with photos until your space looks how you want it to – then take a well-earned rest and relax in your organized AND decorated room!

Robin Gray sponsors local organizing courses in coastal BC, Canada, and writes about clutter and organization at Declutter First!, the decluttering and home organization site.