Organizing Your Home Using Creative And Fun Techniques

Organizing your home can feel like a real drag, especially if you have kids. Teenagers always seem to dread it when the time comes to clean and organize their rooms. Help them out by making it into a fun time, a way for them to express their creativity. Here are some things you can try to make the process less painstaking. (You can use these too when it's time to start organizing your home again.)

First of all, figure out why their rooms stay so perpetually messy. Chances are, they have too much stuff. Teenagers, for whatever reason, all seem to be packrats. They don't throw out anything — journals, test papers from the previous school year, notes their friends passed to them, one earring they found in the locker room, retainers that don't fit anymore — it's amazing (and often gross) what you can find in a teenager's room.

Sit them down and set guidelines for things that should be kept and what shouldn't. Tell them to really think about whether or not they're going to do anything with that retainer or earring, and if the answer is "Um… I guess probably not," it needs to go.

Next, buy or make themed organized products. Are your kids obsessed with all things zebra print? The color green? Justin Bieber? If they have organizing products hey likes looking at, they're way more likely to use them. Get storage units in their favorite colors, or get clear or plain white ones and help them decorate them however they want (even if that means having Justin Bieber staring at you from all directions every time you go in their rooms). Help them figure out fun ways to stack storage shelves so they can be incorporated into the design of the room.

Bribe them. It might sound bad, but they'll definitely be motivated to clean their rooms if you tell them you'll buy them some new clothes, or something else they want. This doesn't mean you can't be tricky about it — buy them things you would have anyway, then act like you're getting the short end of the stick. You'll both be winning — they'll be able to navigate their rooms without having to lilypad over the blank spaces on their floors, and you won't have to listen to your mother-in-law berate you for not keeping your kids in line. You could also tell them you'll give them a few dollars for every piece of junk they clear out or every bag of garbage they bring out.

Appeal to their generous natures. This probably seems completely contradictory in the face of the previous suggestion, but remind your kids how good it feels to help out other people, and that they could easily do that while clearing out their rooms of all their old junk. If they're not feeling overly generous, you could always still bribe them, or guilt them until they do it.

So there you go: easy ways to get your kids to keep their caves — er, rooms — at a respectable level of cleanliness.