Organizing your home does not need to be difficult. You just need to get started and take that first step. One of the first things that you need to know about organizing your home is that it is as much about getting rid of the clutter taking up space in your home as it is about organizing what you have. So lets move on to step one . . .

Step 1: What do you want this room to look like?

Define what you want this room to look like. This is critical because you can't get to where you want to go unless you know what that ?where? looks like. Answering the following questions will help get started in organizing your home. How do you want this room to function? How do you want to feel when you're in it? What do you want to do in this room? What do you really want to use this room for? What is its primary purpose?

Make sure that the other people who share this space with you can agree on the answers to these questions. Organizing your home is a challenge that needs to involve everyone who shares the space. You all have to live in it so agree on what that should look like. This will mean compromise and really listening to the others in your home about the concerns they have about the space.

Step 2: Go through every item in the room.

Remember when I talked about getting rid of the clutter? This is where you do it. Because organizing your home is a big project, don't feel like you need to do this all at once. Going through a drawer here and a shelf there is a great way to break down the project into more manageable pieces. But make sure that you do go through EVERY item in the room.

And there is only one of two ways the item can go: keep or get rid of. Be brutal here. Don't keep things that you know you don't want or use. Organizing your home means making sure that the things you have fit in the space you have. If it does not fit in the space you have, it needs to go.

Step 3: Make your vision a reality.

Here is where you put into action the vision of how you want the room to look that you created in step 1. Here is where organizing your home gets really fun. You get to create the perfect room. You get to make it look exactly how you want it to look.

This step involves making sure that what is left in the room are only the things that you really want in the room. Only leave in the room those items that contribute to your vision of how you want the room to look, feel like and function as. Organizing your home means that you have a place for everything. This is where you get to define that.