Tips to spruce up your home

By Kim Bo-eun

Tall shelves can hold a huge amount of goods. Additional containers on the top can store goods while making your home look neat and tidy. / Courtesy of forbook

Spring is the season for new beginnings. To put the long winter behind them, many people attempt to shed extra pounds gained during the cold months. Others renew New Year resolutions that have not been adhered to too well. But perhaps the best way to make a fresh start is to spruce up your home.

Getting to the bottom

Many have a willingness to clear up their homes, but often feel lost, not knowing where to start. Luckily, there are experts to offer their help.

Experts advise that spring cleaning is not only about vacuuming, wiping and washing. In order to perform these chores more effectively, you should start by organizing your belongings so that you create more space, exposing the neglected nooks and crannies of your home.

Sim Hyun-joo, the author of Casamami Remodeling Storage, brings up Michael Levine’s “broken windows theory” in her book.

The theory is illustrated by how a car with a broken window will end up becoming more battered, because people will think that no one cares about it. A similar car that is clean and in good condition, however, is likely to remain that way.

Sim applies the theory to tidying up. She writes that having a disorderly kitchen will likely lead to more untidiness in other rooms. On the other hand, once you have organized several drawers, you will find that you generally look after them.

The concept is that an organized and orderly space is easier to manage and more likely to be maintained that way.

Sim advises not to try and tidy the house in a single attempt. Not only is this impossible; it will tire you out and you will become demotivated. Instead, she suggests that you take 30 minutes every day to organize and clear up. After six months your home will look remarkably different.

Here are some tips to get you started.

It is a good idea to line up clothes in drawers like in the picture, to make it easier for you to find what you need. This way, you can simply take out the item without having to mess up the drawer.

5 tips on effective storage

Using containers inside cupboards is a helpful way to organize the goods in your home. Classifying the goods and labeling the containers will make it easier for you to find what you need.

The first step is to check the structure of each space: which ways the doors open and whether there are any obstructing cupboard doors or storage rooms. When it is difficult to open doors, it makes you stop trying to put things back in their places and maintain tidiness. If necessary, move away and rearrange furniture that blocks doors.

The second step is to sort out which goods you are going to use and which you will dispose of. This is the most basic yet most important stage in reforming storage space. The key is to reduce the amount of the goods in your home. This makes it easier to move furniture around, organize and maintain your home.

Get two trash bags, one for recycling and the other for regular garbage, and open the cupboard above the sink. Whatever is cracked, chipped, abandoned or useless must go into the trash bags. Starting at the kitchen, you can gradually move on to other rooms in your home.

Third, try to place your belongings carefully, keeping in mind how your usual movements around your house. For example, if you have young children, the room you keep their clothes in should be close to their bedroom. Sim points out there might be instances in which the room for children’s clothes is beside the front door. When the rooms are too far apart, it becomes inconvenient to put the clothes back where they belong, and thus disorder begins.

The next step is to get an idea of how large storage spaces in your house are. This will help you figure out how much you can fit into them. Sim’s key tools are containers and mini-racks which are available in retail stores. Having containers inside cupboards and drawers not only enables more goods to be stored, they separate them according to purposes, making them easy to find. Putting mini-racks inside cupboards maximizes space efficiency.

Finally, to maintain everything you have arranged, constantly dispose of unnecessary goods as they will keep increasing as the years go by.

It helps to organize your belongings so that similar ones are stored together. This way it is easy to see how much of which goods you have so you won’t have to buy the same goods again, which would only increase the number of unnecessary items you own.

Sim says clearing up creates a virtuous cycle.

“Once the spaces (in your home) become organized, you will find yourself more time. And tidiness creates affection for the place you live in. Then, you become motivated to live a better life.”

Sim, who is known by her nickname casamami, is a professional storage consultant who lectures in cities across the nation. She owns the “Casamami” brand which applies her own storage techniques.