Get Your Home Organised in No Time With These 4 Tips!

Getting ready to welcome Hari Raya starts with a good old-fashioned spring cleaning! As you probably know, spring cleaning duties primarily involve thorough mopping, scrubbing, and wiping away dust and dirt. But what’s equally important is the organising and decluttering of the home, which will only add to its sparkling and pristine appearance!

So to help you sort out the storage side of your spring-cleaning tasks, here are four essential tips to follow.

1. Clearing the storeroom

Many Malaysian homes, especially double-storeys, come with a tiny storeroom, often in the dead space under the staircase, and it is typically a hot mess. You may be sitting on precious real estate, but you won’t be able to use it if it looks like a disaster zone.

So step one is to clear out the store—and be ruthless. Throw away things that can’t be reused and give away (or sell) the items you don’t need but are still functional. A good way to organise your store room for maximum utility is to fit storage crates or shelves in the room. You can also consider installing a pull out drawer as seen in this landed home (picture above). This way, the room or area has its best chance of staying tidy, and you’ll have an easier time locating the items you’ve stored!

2. Storing small odds, bits, and bobs

As you continue to spring clean the entire home, you are bound to come across odd ends that you might need but have no place for. The usual suspects include wires and plugs, batteries, adapters, connectors, tape, thread rolls, and a whole host of other things that fit neither here nor there.

The best option to store these is in a shelving unit with concealed or see-through storage that is custom-fit to your space's dimensions. This will lend your home a neat and organised look.

3. Organising papers

It’s amazing how quickly papers, bills, and magazines can be amassed! If your home office (or just the home in general) is cluttered by paper, it’s definitely time to organise! Get started by sorting your paper items into piles of what you need to keep and what you can recycle (shred personal papers before recycling).

For the papers that you still need, do buy a desk or file organiser; it costs less than RM30 and will hold your documents neatly. For a long-term plan, consider going paperless and you'll never have to deal with paper mess again.

4. Organising the kitchen

Finding ‘ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife...?' Then take the opportunity this Ramadhan to organise your kitchen drawers! Start by going through your kitchen utensils—and again, be ruthless with the items you don’t need.

Once you’ve sorted the pieces you want to keep, it’s a good idea to buy a drawer organiser or cutlery tray to keep your knives, forks, spoons, and other utensils well-ordered.

Now that you have the cutlery and tableware sorted, give your kitchen (especially the counter), the once-over with a minimalist eye. What this means is that you should (if you have time to spare) take stock of all the items in your kitchen, including old appliances that may be taking up precious space.

If you have no use for these items, do consider disposing of them. Disposing doesn’t mean throwing it away, though; you can store it or donate it to those in need!