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Don't Just Clean, Decorate
By Joey Lewitin, Fri Dec 9th
Instead of cleaning, decorate Trying to maintain both a beautiful interior, and a neat andorganized home, can be a daunting endeavor. One of the worstmistakes that you can make when planning the design of yourresidence is to arrange it in such a way that your decorationactually gets in the way of maintaining tidiness. Some set upsmay lead to the accumulation of messes, actually working againstthe home maker. It is, however, possible to arrange your home insuch a way that it will naturally lend itself to organization,and will make the job of home maintenance a little easier. There are two kinds of messes that can mar your home; dirt, andclutter. Dirt, along with dust, grime, and mold are the sicklysubstances that attach to walls, collect under furniture, andstain windows. Dirt is something you want to completelyeliminate. For this, you should always plan your home’s designaround expediting the cleaning process; making the eliminationof these unhealthy substances as easy as possible.
Clutter, on the other hand, is made up of items that you own,and is simply a result of them not being put in their properplace, or worse yet not having one. For this, your plan shouldbe to develop a home with a flow in which objects will almostnaturally end up in their proper places. CLUTTER Maintaining organization is the key to a clutter free home. Someclutter is simply trash, and should be eliminated as swiftly aspossible. This often includes old mail and outdated magazines.The easiest way to deter the build up of expired clutter is tointegrate a trash can into the room’s décor. If it is a roomthat doesn’t lend itself to a trash bin, you can be creativewith your receptacles. Almost anything from bright plasticcontainers, to elegant carved wooden chests can be used,especially if it will only be used for dry items. A good placeto find fancy antique bins at a great price is a yard sale.Containers can be used as primary garbage cans, or can be usedas a staging area where trash is deposited initially, and isthen later transferred into a larger container. Most clutter is made up of possessions that you want to keep.Generally your strategy should be to find a way to funnel theseobjects easily into a proper place. To do this you will firstneed to assess what your problem clutter is. These are theobjects that constantly turn up in the wrong spots, creatingthat messy look. The type of clutter you have is usuallydetermined by the room you in and what its purpose generally is. Once you have assessed the problem objects, you need to developa system of categories for the different kinds of clutter in theroom. An easy way to do this is to divide the items based on thecontainer where they will go. For instance, all paper goods goin drawer A, all plastic goods go on shelf B. Categorizing theseobjects in this way will greatly expedite the cleaning process,whenever clutter builds up. Try to avoid being too specific;create broad categories that will be easy to remember and find.You can even try placing tasteful labels on the containers, inplaces where they can’t be seen such as inside of a drawer or onthe back of a shelf. The kind of container you use to store your items will be amajor part of your decorative set up. Shelves are great fordisplay items. They use the height of the room so they don’ttake away from traffic flow, they allow the items on them to bedisplayed in a highly visible manner, they allow you tocategorize items based on the different shelves, and theirheight protects the higher-up objects from children. Drawers areperfect places for useful items with little decorative value.Cabinets work for temporarily displaying items. Opening the doorwill reveal your beautiful collections, creating
an almostinstant transformation in your room. The neat and tidy look of your possessions, lined up in theirproper places, and displayed in tasteful receptacles, is a kindof decoration in and of itself. A setting in which everything isin its proper place will speak more to the quality of your homethan almost any piece of décor that you can buy. Even theplainest white room will take on style when filled with shelvesof decorative items, curio cabinets, and elegant furnituredrawers. If toy clutter from your children is a problem, get theminvolved. Place a brightly colored container in any room wheretoys messes occur, and explain to the child that this is whereany of their toys go. Get them to help you clean up a few times,and eventually they will start to understand the concept. Youcan even turn this into a game, timing how fast they can get allof their toys picked up and into the bucket. DIRT Dirt is more difficult to organize around than clutter. Thegrime that builds up in your home will accumulate more based onthe occupants of the space and their actions, than on any designyou implement. However, by planning your interior accordingly,you can create a setting that will expedite the removal of thedirt in your home, and make cleaning less of a chore. The first step in this job is the removal of clutter describedin the first half of this piece. Once you have removed theclutter from an area you will notice an almost imperceptibleincrease in “flow” in the room. Flow is simply the ability forpeople and objects to move through a space. By increasing theflow in a room, you will make it easier to get to and removedirt. You should make sure that none of your furniture is blocking anyother furniture from the rest of the room. Tables are often theproblem here, being centerpieces in many areas, and may have tobe repositioned in lieu of convenience. Windows too should beleft with as little in front of them as possible; you don’t wantto have to lean over a statue or plant every time you want towipe one down. A possible exception is windows that are higherup, and may benefit from having a piece of furniture beneaththem which you can climb on when cleaning. However, you shouldalways use caution when climbing on any object that was notintended for this use. Placing your furniture on rollers, or positioning them so theycan easily be placed on furniture coasters, will make it lesstrouble to clean underneath. Do not store boxes beneath yourfurniture. This may be the only way to eliminate clutter howeverit also becomes a difficult place to clean, as you will have tobend over, move the boxes, clean, and then replace them. Rarelyseen closets are a much better place for box storage. Interior design is not a static art; it is a form in motion.Your home should be constantly evolving towards a perfectversion of itself. You should always be searching for the rightbalance between decoration and ease. If you consider theproperties of dirt and clutter in a room, before repositioningobjects and items within it, you will save yourself a lot ofannoyance and effort in the future. Joey Lewitin is an author, artist, and designer of home décoraccessories made from imported stone. His line of Unique wall clocksin stone can be seen athttp://Pebblez.com/clockbeautiful.html Or if you don’t use anchor text Joey Lewitin is an author, artist, and designer of home décoraccessories made from imported stone. His line of unique wallclocks in stone can be seen athttp://Pebblez.com/clockbeautiful.html About the author:Joey Lewitin is an author, artist, and designer of home décoraccessories made from imported stone. His line of Unique wall clocksin stone can be seen athttp://Pebblez.com/clockbeautiful.html
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