Best-selling author and organizing guru Julie Morgenstern developed her fabulous SPACE method many years ago. The beauty of this method is that it can be used on ANY area of your home or office…once you get the steps down, you can it apply anywhere!
SPACE stands for Sort, Purge, Assign a Home, Containerize, and Equalize. Here’s the skinny on each step.
1 – SORT
This is just what it says…sort all items. Whether you’re dealing with a drawer, a closet, or even a garage, you need to take everything out in order to accomplish a full-scale sort. Create a staging area where you sort all like items together.
2 – PURGE
You will run across plenty of items you no longer want, need, or love. Purge them out of your life and your space!
- Items that no longer work (for you or anyone) can be dumped or recycled, if applicable.
- Items still in good shape can be donated.
- Items that belong to someone else can be put in your car to be delivered to their rightful home at your earliest convenience!
It’s very common to do a great job organizing, but then to have the donation items or “return-to-others” items cluttering up your space for weeks or months…make it a point to get them out of your space ASAP!
3 – ASSIGN A HOME
So often disorganization happens because things were never really assigned a proper “home” in your home. With everything pulled out, sorted, and purged, you’re now in a great position to select homes for each thing you’re keeping.
Employ the “hot-warm-cold” method when you are selecting homes for each thing:
HOT–>Things used everyday or almost everyday…this should go in the prime real estate of your home.
WARM–>Things used often (1x a week or month) that you want to have easily accessible, but not so much that they deserve the prime real estate of your home…these items go in easy to access spaces, though not the “prime” front-and-center spots.
COLD–>Things used rarely/seasonally…these things should be stored up high or down low, in the harder to reach spots (since they are accessed so infrequently).
4 – CONTAINERIZE
Containers are a critical part of the process. For example, say you decide to put your makeup in a certain drawer in the bathroom. Without containers to section off items by type, the makeup flies all around the drawer after the first open and close. The drawer now looks and feels scattered. This gives you permission to chuck other (non-makeup) items in the drawer and your organizing system is no more!
Regardless of where you’re organizing, whether a drawer, a cabinet, or an entire garage, containers help you to stay organized and to maximize your space.
Hold off on selecting them until you’ve done the first three steps…that way you’ll know how much you have to store and can pick the right containers for each space.
You may already have unused containers in your home…if not, Simply Organized is your one stop shop for all things container!
5 – EQUALIZE
This is an often forgotten part of the process. Equalizing happens after you’ve “lived” with your new organization system for a few days or more. This is the point where you realize the little tweaks you need to make to improve your system.
You might want to adjust where things are “homed” after you realize you use something more often than you thought, and you want it in a more easier access spot.
For my demo of the entire SPACE method, check out this video from Simply Organized on the day of their Grand Opening back in 2012…this is indeed a timeless method!
Article By: Nancy Nino, Aloha Organizers
Reprinted with permission, this article first appeared at www.simplyorganizedhi.com
