Keep it cool in the kitchen, with these cooking tips for hot weather.
Print a household planner and get organized at home with free printables for home organization and management
Clean house fast with tips from professional cleaners.
New focus on the pantry? Get up to speed with tips for pantry building, organization and management. Includes free printables!
Holidays come, and gone ... and left a blizzard of clutter behind? Year-end clutter-cutting tips to start the new year in an organized home.
Get the look, keep your cash? Sure, with these frugal strategies for holiday decorating.
Where do you stand on the unwritten rules of gift-giving? Cut gifting stress!
Take today's extra hour to complete a short home safety checklist. Be ready for winter's challenges!
What to do now for a clean and organized home for winter
Organize your closet and prepare for the coming of Autumn, with a seasonal clothing declutter
Homeschool is hot! Whether you've chosen to school at home--or been dragged into it by current events--try these tips to organize time, home and storage for a happy school year.
Homework can become a flash point for family conflict during the school year. Smooth the way with a time, a place and a plan for homework in your organized home.
Eight great tips to organize children's bedrooms
A new school year is coming! Get the children ready for a new school year with these do-it-now tips.
Make the most of your money--and time--with menu planning. Get the basics for efficient food shopping.
Cutting clutter in the master bathroom? It's easy as A-B-C with these tips.
Clean house fast ... and cheap! ...with pantry recipes for homemade cleaning products.
Stop morning meltdowns and calm clothing emergencies with a simple household laundry system. Here's how.
Travel with kids can be fun ... or infuriating. Calm vacation chaos and keep the "happy" in summer vacation with these family travel tips.
Nothing says "Christmas!" like a beautifully decorated home. Fragrant greens, twinkling lights, holiday centerpieces all set the stage for a merry holiday season.
But at what cost?
If you believe catalog vendors, department stores and florists, be prepared to lay down a bundle to create that holiday home. Each year sees a set of new colors, new images, new trends, all designed to part you from your holiday dollars.
The holidays are here, with wall-to-wall shoppers at the supermarket. Who wants to have to join them?
Instead, assemble a holiday survival kit. Before you shop for the holiday meal, check supplies of these often-forgotten items for your holiday gathering.
Pencil these items into your regular shopping list--and save a last-minute trip. They'll keep the fun in the festivities!
Scanning a list of handmade craft gifts is something like reading a cookbook: it makes you hungry!
Whether you wander the crafts store, settle in at the library's craft bookshelf, or browse online, visions of bright and beautiful gifts follow one after the other. Will this be the year you give hand-crafted gifts ... to everyone?
Give in to the impulse to overload on holiday crafts projects, and you're likely to find yourself drowning in UFOs: Un-Finished Objects. Try these ideas to keep your holiday crafting within bounds--and budget and timeframe, too.
Wrapping gifts for the holidays? Repeat after me: "This year, I won't be wrapping gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve!"
If there's a single most-underestimated holiday chore, it's gift wrapping. Supplies lie scattered throughout the house, while space and privacy are hard to come by. Translation: late-night Christmas Eve wrapping sessions, grumbling your way through the job.
Christmas is coming! Do you understand the unwritten rules of gift-giving?
Each of us carries within ourselves a set of rules about gift-giving. Seldom acknowledged and rarely discussed, these rules determine what we give, how much we give, and to whom we give. Despite living only in our minds and expectations, the unwritten rules of gift-giving govern everything from the office Secret Santa exchange to the family's morning under the Christmas tree.
We should all have a friend like my friend Joyce. No matter what the occasion, she comes up with the perfect gift--even at short notice.
Her wrapped packages are lavish and lovely, her cards are sweet and well-chosen--and she does it on a budget and without last-minute dashes to the shopping mall. Her secret?
A gift closet.
It's a concept we love here at Organized Christmas: a dedicated space in the household to store gift items, gift wrap and cards. A gift closet holds a stockpile of gift items and everything needed to wrap and present them.
For many families, the Christmas season causes more than usual chaos on the home front.
Do you shove stacks of mail and magazines into dark closets to hide them from drop-in visitors? Does your dinnertime schedule fall off the rails when faced with multiple evening rehearsals? Does Mount Washmore raise itself to new heights in the laundry room, only to be scaled in panic an hour before the Nativity play?
Autumn's here and it's time to Fall Back: Time Change Sunday is coming!
On the first Sunday in November, we come to the end of Daylight Saving Time in most of the United States. With an extra hour in the day--and winter on the way--it's a good time for a seasonal home preparedness check
As you circle the house, resetting clocks to Standard Time, make time for this short safety checklist. It'll see you into the winter from a safe--and organized--home:
When you think about Christmas from a few weeks away, there’s a luxurious feeling of “plenty of time”, but as December draws near, the season’s pace quickens exponentially. Where did the time go?
Take major action against the seasonal time crunch with a pre-season scheduling session. The goal: to arrange for all those little appointments that slip the mind so easily.
With the Christmas calendar as a guide, consider scheduling these important pre-season tasks:
