But first, we have to establish a good organizing system so that it will make their tidying up process as effortless as possible—remember small children don’t have a clue of what an organized room look like until you show them. Most importantly, show them how things can be easily retrieve if things are stored where they belong.

Extra Tip: You can make it into a game to demonstrate the benefits of an organized room. Reward them when they can retrieve the things you requested in a given time.

Organizing Tips on Keeping Kids’ Rooms Neat and Tidy

1. Toys, Toys, Toys: Toys, stuffed animals, and games make up the bulk of children’s possessions. Store them in see-through plastic bins so that the children can find the piece they want in one glance. Smaller accessories such as doll shoes and action figurines can be stored in shoe boxes. Do label them accordingly, alternatively take pictures of what those items are and paste it on the side of the shoe box. A hanging shoe holder can also be used to hold small stuffed toys or dolls.
2. Desk Area: A study station with a sturdy desk and proper lighting is a must. Create a simple filing system for your child. Art work, blank paper, and notes from family and friends should be grouped accordingly. Use an old mug to hole pencils, pens, rulers, and scissors.
3. Personal Accessories: Hang hooks on the back of the door to keep caps and backpacks organized. Make sure these hooks are placed at a reachable level for your child.
4. Masterpieces: Hang a ribbon or a string across wall, and use clothes peg to hold art work, photographs, and greeting cards.
5. Library Corner: If your child loves to read, set up shelves and arrange the books neatly. You can even turn a corner of the room into a mini-library and have his friends over to exchange books.

Extra Tip: Hang a checklist white board at the door front. When each task is completed, reward them with a star. Over time, they have accumulated enough to be rewarded for bigger prize. This simple daily checklist will help them cultivate the habit of keeping their rooms spick and span, always…or at least most of the time.

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How to Reorganize Things to Get More of Storage Area

1. Get Rid of Clutter: Organize existing storage space before increasing it. Otherwise your new storage area will create room for more clutter to accumulate. Get rid of things you haven’t used for one year—that “someday” when you will use these items will probably never come.
2. Easy Access: Fill accessible shelves with items you use frequently. The less useful items should go to the top or bottom of the shelves. Having adjustable shelves makes it more convenient to store items in various sizes. Stick to “one motion storage” as far as possible. This enables you to reach items and grab them in one motion without having to move things out of the way.
3. Storage Boxes: Storage boxes that can fit into shelves are useful for smaller items like wires, ornaments and collections. If these boxes aren’t transparent, label them so that you know what’s stored inside at one glance.

After everything is put away, step back, and take one more look. Will anything fall our when the door is opened? Can one shelf be rearranged to make things more accessible? And after this process you should know what you have, where it is, and how to find it.

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Besides, an organized kitchen gives you ample space on the countertop to place ingredients when you cook, with basic condiments placed neatly within reach.

Tips on How to Organize your Kitchen

• To get started, get rid of clutter. If you haven’t used something for a year, thrash it or give it away. There’s no place for chipped dishes, recycled containers you hardly use, or the tea set you didn’t know you had.
• For appliance you seldom use, store them in the cabinet instead of having them take up counter space. Make sure there’s space around the stove for hot dishes as they come out of the oven.
• Spices and seasonings should be placed near your cooking space for ease of access. If you are storing them in drawers and cabinets, line them with shelf liners in case anything spills.
• Examine your shelves and store things like teabags and biscuits in containers and stack them up neatly.
• Canned food should be stored together. Baking ingredients and cake mixes should also go on the same shelf.
• Place detergents and cleaners under the sink, away from places where you store your crockery and utensils. You can also get a basket to hold these general cleaning items and pick them up in one go when you do housecleaning.

Whether you will succeed in getting your kitchen organized depend on these two important tips.

1. Your organize time should not be longer than 30 minutes.
2. Always work on one area or task at a time.

• For example, if you have 15 minutes to spare everyday; you could organize one top cabinet per day and then slowly work your way to lower drawers, shelves, and work station.
• Or you could go by task instead of working an area at a time. For example, discard unused or broken thing on Saturday. Clean and scrub on Sunday. Next, organize all the things the following weekend.

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What Is Feng Shui?

Taken literally, feng shui means wind and water in Mandarin, two of the five elements in feng shui. In essence, it examines how the placement of every day objects affect the flow of chi (the universal life-force energy) in your environment, which in turn influences your personal energy flow and affect how you perform and succeed personally and professionally.

Fundamental Feng Shui Tips For Your Home

As its core, Feng Shui is about how your surroundings can affect your physical and mental health, your relationships, and your worldly success.

Clean Living: To promote good flow of chi in your home, the easiest thing to do is to declutter. A consistent flow of healthy natural energy not only enhances creativity and improves an individual’s well-being and relationships, it also promotes wealth, prosperity, and abundance.

Balancing Lifestyle: The fundamentals of feng shui relate to balancing your environment. This is achieved using the metaphysical laws of nature—known as the yin and yang—and the five elements: metal, water, wood, fire, and earth. By each itself, none of the seven elements is neither good nor bad. These elements will only “turn against” you when we have too much of one of the elements in our home, and our life will become out of sync.

Basic Symbolism of the Seven Elements:

• Yin: Darkness, Cold, Damp. Passive, Black
• Yang: Light, Warm, Dry, Active, Yellow, White
• Metal: Electrical gadgets, metallic fixtures, Gray, Silver
• Water: Bathroom. Fountains, fish tank, Blue, Gray
• Wood: Wooden furniture, Doors, Brown
• Fire: Stove. Red, Orange
• Earth: Stone. Garden. Orange. Dark Yellow

Ward Off Negatives: To keep negative energy at bay, avoid homes with long, narrow corridors, dark corners or steep stairways or at least keep them to a very minimum. For example, you could add light fixtures in dark corners of the house or break the continuous long corridors by placing a “divider” (i.e side table, floor vase) in between.

Water Enhances Wealth and Luck: Water, an important element in feng shui, is often associated with fortune, intelligence, and wisdom. For some, well-placed water features in the home can enhance luck cycles and bring wealth. However, any body of water, be it in a cup or fish tank, should be clean and not murky.

The above ares general feng shui tips. To define your feng shui energy map or to balance the five elements in special corners of your home, please consult a professional feng shui master.

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Know Thy Living Pattern Well

When trying to save space in small apartment, homeowners tend to build more storage room, try to control clutter, then increase storage space again later. It is an endless, often ineffective battle.

To make truly smart use of limited space, objectively regard your apartment as a whole without boxing yourself in with conventional concepts like “sitting room,” “kitchen,” and “bedroom.” Be truthful about what your family’s or your living patterns really are, then adjust your apartment to suit the reality.

Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize!

Ask yourself these questions and consider the answers:

Q. Do we cook often enough to justify a kitchen this size?

If you say “no,” cut your actual kitchen area back to one stove or microwave, sink, refrigerator, and one small cabinet.

Reallocate the remaining kitchen/dinning space. It could be a music area your kids yearn for, an indoor garden for precious plants, a computer corner, or even a corner screened off with sliding doors to give individual members of a large, nosey family some privacy when needed.

Q. Do I need more than one bedroom?

If you’re a newly-wed couple without child, ask yourself if you really intend to raise a family in this apartment. Or if overnight guests are a big part of your life. If it’s “no” to both, perhaps you only need one bedroom.

Are you allowed to knock two rooms into one for one big bedroom? Is it structurally permissible to create an opening in the wall between your living room and one bedroom to form the bigger living room you have always wanted? Would you prefer to keep the other bedroom space intact for a favorite hobby of yours or your spouse’s?

Q. Should the store room be a store room?

Do not keep stuff in your store room merely because it is there. If you don’t really need a store room, you can remove the door, install good lighting, and turn that poky place into a tiny computer niche, or transform it with wood and glass into a proper, built-in display for your much loved crystal collection.

Q. What is my living room used for?

What does your family, partner, or yourself enjoy doing most in the living room? If it is primarily a dining-cum-television area, then make it so, and drop the extras.

If family members spend all their time in their rooms or out, you may not require a conventional living room. Free yourself of the idea that a living room must have sofa, armchairs, coffee table, and television set, and free the space for other thing. You can even section off a small part and erect partitions to make a private retreat for a child who has always shared a bedroom with a sibling, and longs for space of his or her own.

Your small apartment should no longer seem quite so small because when you enjoy and need most will have its necessary space to accommodate whatever it needs.

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Unpacking becomes less of a headache if the packing process is well-planned and executed. Here are some pointers for a smooth move:

• Boxes: You will need lots of them. Boxed items mover better as they can be stacked neatly during loading and unloading. Tape the bottom to ensure that they can take the weight of your belongings and seal the top to prevent it from opening up during transit.
• Label the Boxes: There are various ways to do this, so choose one that you are comfortable with. Some people find it easier to color-code their labels: yellow for kitchen, blue for master bedroom and etc. However, if you are engaging movers, make sure you label your rooms too so they will know where to unload the respective boxes.
• Start Small: Start packing in rooms where items are used less frequently: storeroom, garage, and guest rooms. This way you don’t have to keep opening the boxes to get essential during the packing period. To ease the unpacking process, it is advisable to pack related things together—bookends with shelves, pictures with the hooks etc.
• Make a List: Once you have the boxes in order, make a list, numbering the boxes and their content. This way you can, in one glance, locate the exact thing you need while unpacking.
• Important Documents: There are certain items and documents that shouldn’t go into boxes. Bank books, birth certificates and precious heirloom are things should stay by your side and move together with you to your new abode.

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