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Author: Maria
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10 Mistakes People Make When Organizing Their Home (and What to Do Instead)
The first time I tried to organize my hall closet, I spent $84 on matching bins, labeled every one, and then found that none of them fit the shelves. Six weeks later, the bins were on the floor and the closet looked worse than when I started. I’ve made most of the mistakes on this…
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Home Organization for Beginners: Where to Start When Everything Feels Like Too Much
The first time I tried to organize my whole apartment, I bought $140 worth of bins before I’d thrown a single thing away. I lined them up in the hallway, felt very productive, and then realized I had nothing to put in most of them and nowhere to put the ones I didn’t need. Three…
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11 Must Have Bathroom Storage Products for Small Vanities
My first apartment’s bathroom vanity was 24 inches wide. That’s about the width of a carry-on suitcase, and it had to hold my skincare, my hair tools, a toothbrush, and every other thing I owned that wasn’t clothes. For the first six months I kept a hair dryer on the toilet tank because there was…
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13 Best Drawer Organizers for Every Room in Your Home (Tested, Tweaked, and Mostly Worth It)
Last spring I spent forty minutes looking for a can opener in my own kitchen. It was in the drawer the whole time, buried under a whisk, three takeout chopsticks, and a birthday candle shaped like the number 4. That was the day I stopped telling myself I’d “get to” my drawers eventually. Since then…
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15 Best Pantry Organization Bins and Containers (What’s Worth Buying)
Three years ago I opened my pantry and found a bag of flour I didn’t remember buying, next to a second bag of flour I definitely didn’t remember buying, both losing a fight with a box of spaghetti that had split open. That was the day I got serious about pantry organization bins and containers,…
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How to Organize Bathroom Cabinets for Two People
My partner and I lived with a single shared cabinet shelf for our toothpaste, deodorant, and assorted products for almost a year before I finally snapped over not being able to find my own contact solution behind his three different colognes, and we sat down one Sunday and actually divided the space properly. It took…
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How to Organize a Junk Drawer That Stays Organized
I’ve organized my kitchen’s junk drawer no fewer than six times over the past three years, and for the first five of those, it looked exactly the same as before within about three weeks — a chaotic mix of dead batteries, random keys I can’t identify, and at least one rubber band ball that seems…
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How to Set Up a Label System for Your Whole Home
I owned three different label makers before I figured out that my actual problem was never the equipment — it was that I kept starting a new labeling “system” in a burst of motivation, using whatever font and style felt right that specific afternoon, and ending up with a pantry that looked like four different…
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How to Declutter Your Kitchen Cabinets in a Weekend
I found four vegetable peelers in my kitchen during a cabinet cleanout last spring, and I want to be clear that I live alone and have never once needed more than one vegetable peeler at any given moment. That’s the specific, slightly embarrassing discovery that finally got me to actually declutter my kitchen cabinets properly…
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How to Organize a Pantry on a Budget Step by Step
I organized my pantry for the first time using exactly $23 worth of supplies from the dollar store and a stack of mason jars I already owned, and it’s genuinely held up better over the following two years than a friend’s pantry that she spent close to $400 on with a matching acrylic bin system…