Organize Without Spending Money
You can get organized without spending a lot of money. Actually, you don’t have to spend any money. This might seem unreal if you have been watching The HOME Edit on Netflix. They spend a lot of money on products that make everything look wonderful, but is it more organized? Can it be maintained? There are many small things you can do to be more organized without shelling out cash and they don’t take much time at all.
10 Ways to Organize without spending any money.
Try these tips below:
- Plan Meals. Have a plan. Use your calendar to schedule easy-to-make meals on the days you don’t have a lot of time.
- Turn your hangers around to identify the items you never wear. This is a great exercise to do with the change of seasons, in Spring and Fall.
- Note everything down in your calendar. I mean everything! Then look at your calendar every morning.
- Make a grocery list. This goes along with planning meals. Once you get into the habit, writing a list will only take a few minutes.
- Organize your pantry. Knowing what you have and making it easy to find will save you time and money.
- Sort piles into groups of like-items. Doing this exercise will help you identify good homes for these groups of items.
- Reuse empty containers to store things. You can organize without spending money by using what you already have.
- Organize your loose photos in chronological order. This is a big one! If you own a lot of physical photos (digital too!) it can be overwhelming.
- Write down family routines and post them for all to see. Sharing schedules is a great way to communicate with your busy family.
- Live with less. YES! Limiting what you own will bring you more space and less stress.
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Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
Janet Schiesl
Janet has been organizing since 2005. She is a Certified Professional Organizer and the owner of Basic Organization.
She loves using her background as a space planner to challenge her clients to look at their space differently. She leads the team in large projects and works one-on-one with clients to help the process move quickly and comfortably. Call her crazy, but she loves to work with paper, to purge what is not needed and to create filing systems that work for each individual client.
Janet is a Past Board Member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and a Past President of the Washington DC Chapter of NAPO were she has been named Organizer of the Year and Volunteer of the Year.
# 10 – Live with less – I keep trying!
You can do it!
These are great strategies, Janet! My grandmother (my mom’s mom) excelled at repurposing containers to organize. I found some of my grandmother’s containers when I cleared my mom’s house. They were glass coffee jars she had cleaned, labeled with masking tape, and repurposed to hold sugar and flour. I also remember her using plastic lids from cans for coasters or to corral coins. She believed in not wasting anything. When bars of soap got so small and hard to use, she found a way to get every last drop out of them. She took a sponge, made a slit, and inserted the soap fragments into the sponge. Then she made another slice in the top and inserted a rubber band to hang the soapy sponge to use while showering.
Wow, your grandmother had it down! Now I see where you get it from.
These are all great strategies, Janet. There are terrific organizing containers available when you look around your house and re-use the containers things arrive in. Shoeboxes, some yogurt containers, and egg cartons are things that come to mind.
Thank you. Those are great suggestions!
This is so true! As a matter of fact, just last Friday I was asking a client if they had any furniture in the house that might serve our needs in her office. I said, “Can we shop the house?” Sure enough, we found a bookcase in the basement.
Buying should really be the last step, and often you don’t even need to. I find the plastic inserts in cookie packaging often works great for very shallow drawers!
Yes, buying should be the last step. Cookie inserts are a great idea.
I just organized my pantry yesterday, yes, on Mother’s Day. =) Just a little switch of items and reorganizing some other things, and it worked beautifully, and I made more space. =) Yay! Great tips, Janet!
What a great project. Those little ones sometimes make such a big difference.
Great tips. Too many people think of organizing as only sorting items by functions and buying containers. As you listed all the other ways to organize your life make a big impact on lowering stress and overwhelm.
Yes, there’s so much more when you want to do it right!
These are excellent ideas. You might need to spend money at some point, but completing these tasks first will make sure you don’t buy anything you don’t actually need.
Yes, it makes sense financially and strategically.
I don’t have a family household, and I don’t really have a pantry, but all of the other tips are exactly how I practice staying organized; these are stellar ideas that everyone should try to incorporate in their lives. And I’m a big believer in organizing being about process, not products, so yay!
Awesome!