Organizing My Apartment {7 Rules For The Bedroom)

Welcome to part two of the Organizing My Apartment series. Today we are going to take a look at my bedroom and I will share my seven rules for keeping it organized. Now, if you are like me than your bedroom is probably the last place that gets organized. It is often the hiding place for my half-done crafts, leftover decorations and piles of laundry. But I absolutely love the feeling of crawling into bed at the end of the day and being able to completely relax without thinking about how chaotic the room is. Your bedroom should be a calming place that you look forward to going after a long day. Here are my seven simple rules for keeping a bedroom organized.

Rule #1  Choose furniture with drawers. Drawers will help you keep clutter hidden out of sight. And make sure you are using all of your drawer space–David had some extra space in his sock drawer, so we stash the iron in there, and an empty drawer holds all kinds of craft supplies.

Rule #2  Buy plastic storage totes that slide under your bed. We don’t have a lot of dresser space, so I keep a tote with my sweatpants in an easily accessible spot under our bed. We also don’t have room on our shelves for all our board games, so there is a large selection of the ones we rarely play stashed away under the bed. Make sure you have a bed skirt to cover up all you stuff under there.

Rule #3   Add a bench to the foot of the bed. A bench will add seating and storage. This bench (a wedding gift from my awesome brother) doesn’t have built-in storage on the bottom, but a set of pretty baskets underneath could help keep things contained if I needed more storage. And if we need more seating in the living room, we can easily slide it out the door thanks to the handy felt pads on the legs. If you have room at the end of your bed, look for a bench or chest that can do double duty as storage and seating. Before the bench, my cedar chest (now at home in the living room) served as storage in our bedroom.

Rule #4  Color code the closet. When I tell people I color code my closet, I often get an eye roll. But I insist it is useful! It is the easiest way to organize my clothes and it helps when I am searching for a specific thing. Within each color, I aim to organize everything by sleeve length so the tank tops are first in that section and the jackets are last. If that is too intense for you, just shoot for keeping like colors together. I hang up as much clothing as I can possibly fit in my closet. Why? Because I am much more likely to wear something if I can see it hanging there, while the things in the bottom of my drawers rarely see daylight.

Rule #5  Hide mismatched furniture out of sight when possible. We are fortunate to have a large bedroom, and this wall is great for some of our old furniture that is still functional so I can’t justify getting rid of it and our budget doesn’t really allow for replacements right now. A hodgepodge of things with different colors like this can make things appear messy even if they are not, so I just keep these all on this wall since it isn’t visible from the living room. I have grand plans to paint that dresser some day, but I cannot decide what color. I’d love to hear your ideas!

Rule #6  Keep things off the floor. This is the rule I struggle to follow. The photo above is proof of my struggles, since I just grabbed my camera to get a quick photo for this rule and voila, there was already a mess on the floor. It can be easy to ignore the pile of clothes on the floor and go right to bed, but I am much more relaxed if there isn’t a mess for my mind to think about all night. So I try to take just a couple minutes before bed and put things back where they belong so at least the floor is mess-free. Don’t worry, I will try to follow my own advice and pick up these clothes before bed tonight.

Rule #7  Make the bed every day. My newest rule is to make the bed every single morning. It is weirdly calming to come home after work and see a neatly-made bed. That one simple task every morning makes the room look so much cleaner, even if the rest of it needs some attention. Also, our bedroom is visible from the living room so I like to keep the bed made just in case we have any unexpected guests over. An unmade bed just looks sloppy.

There you go! My seven rules for keeping our bedroom organized. What am I forgetting? Comment below! And stay tuned for part three of the Organizing My Apartment series next week, which will focus on the kitchen.

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