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Home Organization Strategies - Sort Now, Handle Later
by Karen Fritscher-Porter

Description: Easy organizing techniques for sorting household items that tend to pile up easily.

Home organization tactics include sorting items now, or ongoing, to save you time later on tedious chores and mundane tasks. Here are three items you can sort in your home as you lay them down or put them away along with the home organizational details of how to do so.

SORT LAUNDRY - Speed up your laundry chores by pre-sorting your dirty clothes. Use a three-compartment laundry sorter for this method (although you could substitute laundry baskets or bins too). These laundry sorters are usually comprised of a lightweight metal frame that holds a three-compartment mesh or canvas laundry bag. Many online and walk-in retail stores sell them. Designate a compartment for 1) whites, 2) gentle wash and 3) regular color fabric washes.

When you put clothes into the laundry sorter or hamper, immediately put them into one of those three designated compartments. If you gently compress the dirty laundry in each compartment, then when full it averages about a single full washing machine load. So you can easily see when it's time to drop a laundry load into your washing machine. And it takes just seconds since you've pre-sorted the laundry ongoing. You can use a separate laundry hamper to hold dirty towels and linens.

SORT COINS - If you're tired of finding loose coins in the washing machine and you're tired of sucking them up accidentally with the vacuum, give family members their own own piggy bank. But not just any piggy bank. You need to give everyone the grown up version of the piggy bank which is called a "Coin Sorting Machine". It's a miniature version of what you see in some banks where you drop coins into the hopper and the machine sorts it all out.

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The at-home version is the "coin sorting machine" gadget. One version seen in stores is a coin sorter that allows you to dump up to 20 coins at a time into the hopper, push a button and it sorts and counts them into wrappers that you place inside the tubes. You're ready to take them to the bank now---the real bank.

SORT MAIL - In the old days, professional organizers suggested sorting your mail over a trash can. In today's world, you'd be more secure making that "sort your mail over a trash can that's beneath your cross-cut shredder." That'll prevent strangers up to no good from searching through your trash to find credit card applications pre-filled with your name and mail order catalog pre-approved credit order forms (especially around the holidays when you get more of these).

When you find an invoice or bill, put it in a "daily organizer". A daily organizer is a small rectangular box style gadget stores sell. It has 31 slots to hold your bills, appointment slips, timely notes, greeting cards to mail---whatever you need to do or know on that day of the month. Put each bill as it arrives into a slot that's a week before its due date. Check this 31-day bill organizer daily to see what's due to send that day. Some of these pre-made bill organizers also contain drawers at the bottom to hold pens and stamps. If you don't want to buy a 31-day bill organizer, consider using 31 manila folders. Label one for each day of the month. Hang them in your home office drawer using some green hanging folders or put them in a portable file box and store it somewhere convenient.

See how sorting items now can save you time later? You can apply this home organization technique to other items that need organizing in your home too. For instance, a little time spent setting up a system to pre-sort hand tools and hardware in the garage or sewing items in your home will benefit you when you get ready to enjoy a project using these items. Look around your home and you may find other areas that you can apply this home organization method to.

Karen Fritscher-Porter publishes http://www.EasyHomeOrganizing.com where you can read hundreds of free tips with home organization solutions, shop for home organization products and subscribe to free home organization newsletters.