(upbeat music)
- I've always been a little obsessed with organization.
Maybe it's the minimalist in me or the perfectionist,
but I find something so satisfying
about creating order from chaos.
And today there's no shortage
of advice online about how to organize our homes.
I've got hundreds of pins and bookmarks to prove it.
But it's hard to know which of this advice is helpful
and which is needlessly complicating your life.
So in this video,
I wanna share nine realistic things
that we actually do that help us
to keep our home clean, tidy, and organized.
So let's start with cable management.
There's nothing that will set me
into an unreasonable rage
more than seeing exposed cables tangling out in the open.
One thing that's helped are these cable ties,
and also these cable ties.
These little rubber ones are great
for wrapping up cables quickly and holding them in place.
They're especially handy
if you find yourself needing to wrap
and unwrap cables often.
And I love these longer straps
when I'm fastening multiple cables together
or fixing them to furniture.
These cable holders also help
to secure our charging cables
behind our end table.
That way we can access them when we need to,
but hide them away when they aren't in use.
Sandwich bags.
This is one of the simplest solutions
that I discovered early on as a filmmaker.
With the amount of nuts, bolts and cables I was collecting,
I needed a way to keep them all organized
and easy to get to.
I mean, I have over 30 hard drives
and they all come with multiple cables.
So one day I opened up the drawer in my kitchen,
pulled out some sandwich bags
and started organizing all the little bits and bobs.
You could use either sandwich bags
or freezer bags to organize vitamins,
baby bottles and other household items.
Most people have them in their homes.
They're really cheap,
and I found that they hold up for a really long time.
One of the rules that we follow in our house
that helps us keep things organized
is don't put it down, put it away.
I can't take credit for this rule
as it's something that I picked up
years ago through one of my many bookmarks.
But it's been so helpful in keeping our house clutter free.
When you get home from the gym,
don't throw your bag on the ground,
hang it up in the closet.
When you're done with your dishes,
don't put them in the sink,
put them in the dishwasher.
When your kid's finish playing with their toys...
Ah, fuck it.
Just leave it there,
'cause he's gonna be back there
in the same spot in two hours.
And who has the time to clean up
after your kids 20 times a day?
But I mean, you get the idea.
When you first implement this rule,
it's something that you really need to think
about every time you put an object down.
But eventually, it becomes a habit,
and without realizing it,
you're helping to keep your house clutter free
and you're also saving yourself
a ton of time of cleanup later on.
All right, so one tiny organization bonus tip
that's not one of the nine main ones
I'm talking about in this video.
A magnetic sponge holder.
I know it's impressive.
It's got a little magnet that allows you
to connect it to the inside of the sink,
and so it hides your gross sponge
out of the open kitchen area.
And if it's wet, the water will just drip
into the kitchen sink.
I just love little practical devices like this
that make a small but noticeable difference
in how you keep your home tidy.
One thing we were worried about
when we moved into our house was the lack of storage.
I've been picking up a lot of hobbies lately,
from golf to baseball and power lifting.
Nat has a lot of coats, bags, and hats.
And with a new baby on the way,
we weren't sure where the hell
we were gonna store all of our stuff.
This is the first home that Nat and I have ever owned,
and so it's given us a little bit more freedom
to create custom storage to fit our needs,
like this cabinet right here behind me.
This is what it looked like before we moved in.
It was just one large broom closet,
so much of it was unaccessible.
- We get very excited about storage.
- And here's what it looked like after the renovation.
You can't even tell that these are storage cabinets,
but behind each of these panels is a push to open closet.
There's one row for my stuff, one row for Nat's,
one row for Frankie's, and so on.
One thing that's super convenient
and also helps to keep the rest of our house
a little more organized
is adding a charging station inside of the cabinet.
This way, we don't have our devices charging
on a countertop or on the ground next to an outlet.
Literally all of these panels are storage,
all the way down to the smallest one here.
This would've literally just been dead space
if we hadn't installed these,
and so now we can make use of it
in a more intentional way.
I don't even need that,
I'm just doing this for the video.
While we're on the under stair storage,
I wanna point out one thing that
specifically helped us organize
our front entryway more than anything else, a shoe cubby.
After the first few months of living here,
we noticed that our shoes kept piling up at the front door.
But no matter how much we wanted to,
or tried to clean up the entry hallway,
it would always get cluttered with a long row of shoes.
We didn't have a closet at the front door,
and there wasn't enough space for a storage cabinet.
So we got the idea to move around
some of the storage under the stairs
to make room for a shoe cubby.
I measured out the space, added an additional shelf,
and placed some paper down
to prevent the shelves from getting dirty.
And then we were able to put all of our shoes out of sight.
The white paper is actually kind of gross
and getting a little bit dirty,
so I might replace this with black paper in the future.
But for now, this works fine for us.
Sometimes we leave a few shoes at the front entryway,
but it's by far so much more tidy than it used to be,
and it's easy to stow all of them away if we want to.
(upbeat music)
I know what you're thinking,
"Matt, how do you make videos
about organizing your home so interesting?"
That's a good question.
What I've learned is that
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or click the link in the description below this video.
Now let's talk about junk drawers.
Without structure,
every drawer eventually becomes a junk drawer.
One thing that's helped us keep our drawers organized
and clutter-free is adding drawer dividers.
For my office, I use drawer dividers
to neatly organize all my gear
into sections reserved for lenses, cameras, and batteries.
And I've used a toolbox liner
to make sure that nothing slides around
or gets damaged when opening and closing the drawer.
We've also used drawer dividers
in our kitchen to separate our daily vitamins
from medicine that we use less frequently,
or by splitting up otherwise chaotic junk drawers
into something a little bit easier
to organize and understand.
In the past, we've also used a cutlery
or a silverware tray to get even more organized.
We've used this to organize junk drawers and toiletries.
We don't currently find that we need them in this house,
but they're a great alternative to drawer dividers.
So when you live in a home with minimal storage,
every space counts,
and that's why we decided to get really intentional
with how we organize the space under our bed.
There are some beds that come with drawers,
but you can also use these zip up bags like we do.
We use these bags to store seasonal clothes
or clothes that Frankie has grown out of.
Anything that we don't immediately need right now
but will need in the future get zipped up and stored away.
One essential principle to keeping our home
organized has been everything has its place.
This takes a little bit of thought and planning,
but it's helped us clean our home faster
and prevents things from getting lost,
something that I used to do all the time.
So whenever Nat and I move into a new home,
we always get on the same page
about where we're gonna store everything,
from our silverware to office supplies.
One thing that's helped us to do this
is to pick up a bunch of different sized
clear plastic containers.
While they aren't beautiful,
they make it really easy
to see what's inside without opening them up.
Finding a place for everything
is a little bit easier
when you limit the things that
you own in the first place.
So we don't buy shit that we don't need.
Every time we think about making a purchase,
each time someone drops off a bag of clothes for Frankie,
we really think through what we want to bring
into this house and what we want to keep.
When you have less stuff,
you have less stuff to organize,
less stuff to put away,
less stuff to put into sandwich bags,
and less stuff to separate with drawer dividers.
And this isn't an easy process.
It means really thinking
through every single item that's in your home.
I may have 30 hard drives,
but I didn't keep every single cable
for every single drive.
I kept a handful that I needed and recycled the rest.
And I think most importantly,
we're not afraid to let go of things when our life changes,
whether it's a jacket we stop wearing,
or a gym belt we no longer need.
We will frequently donate
or sell items to help clear the clutter from our home.
Our house is organized, but it's not perfect.
The space under our sink is a mess,
we have a cabinet that's stuffed with cleaning supplies,
and my wardrobe definitely isn't Instagram worthy.
And that's totally fine with us,
because now that we've got a system that's good enough,
we can spend our time doing more important things
than organizing used batteries.