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Eight Mom Tested Simple Organization Tips

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Organization.
Yep.
You might recall last week I told you all that I was sharing some of my favorite tips over at Mama to 4 Blessings, and hopefully you all ran right over and read them. However, if you didn’t you can still find them there, but I thought I’d share them with you here as well.

As you probably know by now if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, I’m a mama to five little blessings ages 4-15, so you can imagine how chaotic my house can get every now and then, right? While my husband might argue with me over it, I think I’m a fairly organized person. Like most of us moms do, I have a few tricks of the trade to help our households run smoothly, and I wanted to share them with you. These are some easy organization tips in some of the areas that often go unnoticed until they tend to takeover our spaces, leaving us frustrated and stressed.

1. To keep the kids from arguing over beach and pool towels, assign each child a color towel that’s theirs alone all summer. This way, you’ll know who brought theirs and who didn’t (and who left it laying in the wet pile on the floor).

2. I have four boys, and my 10 and 12 year old wear very close to the same size, as well as my four and six year old. To save confusion about which jeans fit whom, I label the inside pocket with the initial of the smaller child. This way, when putting away laundry or getting ready in the morning, there’s no trying on seven pairs before finding the pair that fits.

3. Speaking of clothing, I keep a laundry basket in the top of the kiddos closets specifically for the next size up. When outfitting five kids who grow like weeds, I’d rather not need to take out a second mortgage on my house each season, so besides passing down clothing from one kid to the next, I’ll also often buy off season clearance one size up and save it for the following year. But I’ve found if I don’t put it in a specific place, I’ll forget I have it. This way, you can look through your next size basket before each season and pull out what will fit.

4. Now, how about all those toys. I’m a huge fan of separating toys into baskets and containers, but I also like to have them labeled. These are just inexpensive baskets from Walmart, and I attached rings and wood labels onto them. I found the rings in the scrapbook section, and ordered the wood tags from Etsy, however recently I’ve seen similar wood tags also in the scrapbook section of stores.

5. For the little ones who can’t read yet or who are perfecting their skills, I print pictures I find online and tape it to the fronts of drawers. This also works great on dressers, labeling the drawers with pictures of pants, shirts, etc. No more excuses why those toys aren’t where they belong. Well, except maybe (if they’re anything like my kids) that they just didn’t want to put them away

6. Bathtub toys. Yikes. There’s nothing like being ready for a hot shower at the end of the day, only to open the shower curtain and find toys scattered everywhere. Solution? A cheap dollar store kitchen colander. Not only does it contain the toys, but they’ll dry off as well.

7. Alright ya’ll. The junk drawer. We all have one (or three. or more?) but how about some small plastic baskets, again from a dollar store, to help out just a bit. Don’t over think it, you can still be junky if you want, just try to sort like items with like items. It takes as much time to throw a pencil in the pencil basket as it does to throw it into the drawer in the first place.

8. Okay, last one. On the inside of my medicine cabinet, I hang medicine dosage info. In fact, on the insides of most of my cabinets and my pantry door, I hang many of my important papers, such as the kids school schedules, important phone numbers, etc. Growing up my mom kept one on the inside of the cabinet that held our drinking glasses with everyone’s birthdays on it. We looked at it each time we opened the cabinet, and to this day I could probably tell you when my second cousin on my dad’s side’s birthday is.

There you have it my friends. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to take a few of my ideas I’ve tried over the past 15 years of being a mommy, and apply them to your lives as well.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  4. Carla Karam says

    Molly.. awesome tips!! Thank you for sharing.
    Thank you so much for joining us in Thursdays Favorite Things Blog Hop! With His grace, wishing you peace and many blessings to you and yours… Carla

  5. Raquel@2dayswoman says

    Great tips, thanks! I love the baskets with rings idea, looks great and very handy for finding things.
    Hopping over from Katherine and Carla's blog hop Thursday 🙂
    Happy Thursday to you.

  10. Katherines Corner says

    great tips. love the colander for the bath toys idea . Thank you for your bloggy friendship and for sharing on the Thursday Favorite Things hop. Hoping you have a great weekend xo

  13. Janelle says

    One of my friends does the laundry basket in the closet for the next size up thing except hers is a plastic tub under the bed ; ). I love the medicine cabinet idea! I'm kinda OCD about reading directions before taking a medication and this could make things a lot easier!

  15. being mom{me} says

    Great tips – especially the important notes on the inside of cupboard doors!
    I'm visiting from Ta-Da Tuesday. Have a great week!
    Rhiannon at beingmomme.blogspot.com

  17. Tat says

    I read your first tip and I thought, "Great, I do that, I'm doing great!" So we have our towels sorted out, but everything else pretty disorganised. Thanks for the tips!

  19. Lindsay Gill says

    Here from the Frugal Crafty Home Blog Hop! We only have one child but these will be very important if we have more! Bookmarking for the future! Now following!
    Lindsay @ weddingringstoteethingrings.blogspot.com

  22. Bonnie H says

    Those are some great tips. Assigning beach towels is genius!
    Bonnie @ Our Secondhand House

  25. angsays says

    I love the important papers inside the cabinet doors! What a great way to keep important info but also out of sight.

    Stopping by from Sugar Bee Crafts.
    Angela