Tips for Organizing My Bedroom --- please!!

"Can you give me some tips for organizing my bedroom?" is one of the requests professional organizers hear most often from new clients. In fact, disorganized, unattractive, uninviting bedrooms can be the trigger that finally makes a person decide to organize their home and their life. What you need is a plan.

First, you need to be clear about one distinction: do you want to organize your bedroom, or do you want to de-clutter your bedroom? People often think they need to organize their bedroom, when they really mean they need to clear out all the old junk that's cluttering it up! Here are some tips for organizing your bedroom. (If you want to de-clutter your bedroom, see the list at the end of the page.)

1. Write down all the things you typically do in your bedroom. That might include reading, watching television, listening to music, doing household paperwork, working on your hobby or even running a small business.

2. For each activity, write down everything you need. For example, if you watch TV you'll need a TV set and probably a TV Guide. If you do your paperwork here, you'll need some sort of file box or container for the bills, a checkbook, pen, notebook etc. Hobbyists will need their hobby supplies and some kind of container to keep them all together, while small business owners will need a desk or a surface where they can write and also operate their computer. Your own list will be whatever you want it to be. Remember, it's YOUR bedroom and it should be organized to suit the way YOU use it.

3. Arrange the furniture so that the things you need are readily accessible near the spot where you use them. Your TV, for example, needs to be visible either from the bed, if that's where you watch from, or from a chair, but it doesn't need to take center stage from all vantage points in the room!

4. A craft area can be challenging, especially if you're working with a small space. However, you'll need a chair to sit in while you work (unless you like sitting on the floor, in which case you'll need enough clear floor space.) Some hobbies and crafts need a lot of supplies, so you'll need something to keep those in. Try to find as attractive a container as you can, because it will form part of the overall decor of the room. Look in dollar stores, for example, and you'll find lots of great baskets, boxes and other containers. Spray paint a basket to match you room. If your hobby involves painting, try painting a design on the box itself. If you do have a hobby area in your bedroom, the number one rule is always to put away your supplies when you're finished a session, because there's nothing that will clutter up a bedroom more than bales of material, balls of wool, tubes of paint or any of the other paraphernalia of hobbies!

The following tips are for storage, which can also be a bedroom challenge.

5. Choose bedside furniture that does double duty, a table surface as well as storage space. There are lots of bedside cupboards that do both. You can put books in the cupboard, CDs if you listen to music in the bedroom, or even your household papers. If you have a small table at your bedside and you're not ready to buy a new piece of furniture, you can buy an attractive cloth instead and drape it over, creating "walls" that cover the area under the table. That turns it into storage space!

6. Look for one of those chests or trunks that go at the foot of the bed, almost like an extension of the bed itself. They are designed for spare bedding, but there's no rule that says you can't use them to store anything at all that you use in the bedroom.

7. Don't forget about the walls as storage space. Stores like Ikea have a huge variety of practical, attractive shelving units that can provide a home for almost anything.

8. Use your clothes cupboard for clothes. If you stuff it full of other odds and ends they'll soon get jumbled up and become clutter --- and they won't do your clothes any good either!

9. Store off-season clothing, extra linen etc. under the bed. It can get dusty down there though, so be sure to clean it regularly.

OK, it's organized. Now all you have to do is keep it tidy and uncluttered! For help de-cluttering your bedroom, look at these pages:

The Decluttering Questions

Learning to Reduce Clutter using Feng Shui

Reducing clutter and sorting clothes

You'll also get help from my free mini-course. You did sign up for it, didn't you? If not, fill in the little form on the column to the left, and your first sanity-saving lesson will be in your e-mailbox in moments!