Create It!

Hopefully by this point you have already done steps 1-4 and are ready to get down to business creating systems to help your room function well! Step 5 is the biggest one, so I'm going to take a bit of time to break it down for you into bite size pieces.

Step 5a - This is where you get to clean your room! Begin by putting everything in its place. If you don't know where it goes, set it aside. When everything that has homes is in its place, go through the homeless items and determine which belong in the room. Then find homes for those items. It's okay if it's not a permanent home, but it does need to be reasonable. Don't just stuff all the homeless stuff under your bed. ;)

Here's a look at my room after things have found their homes...

Step 5b - Assess your storage situation. Do you have too little storage in this room for what you're trying to keep in here? Do you have more storage than you need? Do you know where to find things when you need them?

As I look at this, I have one empty top drawer, and one drawer that has T-Shirts in it that I never wear. There is no reason for me to store those shirts here. I have another place those could live. 

Until I looked in the drawer, I couldn't have told you that I have 2 extra blankets in that first drawer. And while I keep candles in the second drawer, I don't use them in this room, so I should relocate the candles to the living room, where I actually use them. I do, however, light candles in my bedroom, so I would like to keep a lighter in the room. Perhaps that could go in the empty dresser drawer. 

If I needed to, I could store stuff under my bed in those long boxes. I keep the heating pad in the bedstand on my side and Leif and I both keep miscellaneous reading materials in the baskets on the bedstands. 

Now, technically, everything we've done in steps a and b has been ORGANIZING, not SYSTEMATIZING. For my thoughts on the difference between them, read my post here. But it's easier to create a system from an organized space than from chaos. So... are you ready to create your SYSTEM??

If you remember, the biggest system I needed to create for my bedroom is one for laundry. To create a laundry system, I needed to think through what comes into and goes out of my room in terms of laundry. I wear dirty laundry into the room. It comes off and goes into the hamper (or on the floor, but let's just assume for today that I'm remembering to put it in the hamper, okay?). 

Problem: When it is time to do laundry, the dirty laundry goes to the laundry room. If I take it IN the hamper to the laundry room, I am left without a hamper and I throw my laundry on the floor where the hamper should be, or on the floor where the hamper shouldn't be. If I leave the hamper in my room, I sort the laundry on the floor and end up with a huge mess of laundry piles until all the laundry is done, which could take days. If I take the laundry to the laundry room to sort and bring the hamper back, I can't tell what clothes in the laundry room are clean and which are dirty. What would help?

Solution: Bring a laundry basket into my room and sort a load into the laundry basket, then take that to the laundry room to wash. It goes right into the washer, then the dryer. 

Clean laundry comes back into my room to be put away. 

Problem: If I bring the laundry into the room and put it on the bed to sort, fold, and put away I find that I don't get it all done and some gets transferred to the dresser or window seat when we go to bed. 

Solution: When the laundry is dry, hang or fold it IN the laundry room so that it goes THROUGH our room to the closet, or straight to the dresser. That way it never even makes it to the bed as a stopping place. 

 The laundry system guidelines I created are as follows:

1. Put dirty laundry directly into the hamper, NEVER on the floor.

2. Sort dirty laundry into baskets, not into piles on the floor.

3. Never fold, sort, or hang clean laundry in the bedroom. That is what the laundry room is for. 

Other guidelines I created to keep my master bedroom system working smoothly are... 

1. Keep dresser cleared off.

2. Always put jewelry in the closet, not in the bedroom.

3. Charge tablet and phone every night.

4. Empty trash on Tuesdays. 

The last step of a system? DO IT UNTIL IT IS HABIT!! That's what I'm working on!