Living through renovations, natural disasters, and moving can be a very stressful and disorganized time. Your house is turned upside down in the blink of an eye and before you know it, you’re stepping over stacks of books on your way to the bathroom and the dog is snoozing on top of a box labeled, “The GOOD China” – just thinking about it gives me a headache!
Instead of gritting your teeth and living through the chaos, you can follow these three easy steps that will help to not only organize your home during transitional times (such as moving or renovating the kitchen), but they’ll also help to keep you sane.
- The Hot Mess Room Challenge
The first step is to do the Hot Mess Room Challenge well in advance. The challenge is different for everyone because no two “hot mess rooms” are the same. Your hot mess room could be your basement, the guest bedroom, or your garage. It’s the room in the house that has collected a mass of random items that don’t have a place anywhere else in the home. If you’re thinking of a room like that in your house, it’s your hot mess room!
So, what is the Hot Mess Room Challenge?
The Hot Mess Room Challenge takes 28 days to complete and it takes you through the process of getting your hot mess room organized. You can think of the hot mess room like a jigsaw puzzle. The challenge will help you to separate each piece, organize each one and, in the end, put them together into an organized storage unit.
At the end of the 28-day challenge, instead of a hot mess room, you’ll have an organized storage room with shelving, bins with color-coded labels, and a complete inventory of everything you have stored in that room.
When disaster strikes and you need to find something such as a flashlight or a photograph of a family member, you can’t waste time looking through boxes upon boxes. Having an inventory gives you peace of mind knowing that if you ever need something in a rush, you’ll know exactly where to find it.
- The Sunday Basket®
Once you have completed the Hot Mess Room Challenge, you’re ready to move onto stage two – organizing your Sunday Basket® System!
You need to make sure that your Sunday Basket is ALWAYS accessible to you 100% of the time. You should think of your Sunday Basket as your lifeline during these stressful transitional times.
Your Sunday Basket is where you will keep your color-coded lists of everything that is in your storage room and an inventory of the things you have packed into boxes. If you are renovating your kitchen, for example, you would label boxes with things such as “Utensils,” “Dishes,” “Pots and Pans,” etc. So when you need to find something inside one of the kitchen renovation boxes, you can check the Sunday Basket checklist and it will tell you exactly where you can find that item.
Another reason why you need your Sunday Basket up and running when you’re moving or renovating your home is that, in both of these cases, you’ll have paperwork coming in such as household bills, invoices, etc. and you can keep all of these papers organized in your Sunday Basket.
- The Organize 365 Binders
Before you move or renovate your home, you need to make each of the four Organize 365 Binders to eliminate your filing cabinet and organize all of your paperwork. Once you have all of your binders arranged, you can move to your new house without trailing a bunch of unsightly and disorganized filing cabinets with you – how awesome does that sound?
It takes time to organize each binder, so I would suggest tackling one at a time. If you’d like to find out how I organized my binders, you can head over to the Sunday Basket® Podcast to hear more about that and each of the four binders I mention below:
Medical Binder: You should think of the Medical Organizing Binder as a caregiver binder and store information regarding your family’s medical and health history, doctor information, diagnosis tracker, immunization record, hospitalization, surgery history, and so on.
Financial Binder: The Financial Organizing Binder is for all of your finances, which includes everything you need to keep your finances in order during a home renovation, a move, or when a natural disaster strikes. Inside, you should keep your insurance policy information, financial prep sheet, credit card inventory, bill payment records, debts and loans, and any other finances that you need to keep track of.
Household Reference Binder: Every homeowner needs a Household Reference Binder. It’s where you should store everything that you want the new homeowner to know (if you’re selling your house), including home exterior and interior information, home appliances, and details of things such as when you last checked the water heater, etc.
Household Operations Binder: The Household Operations Binder is the key to maintaining your home and running the household. Inside this binder, you should keep all of the basic household information, important dates, trackers, meal planning, and your plan in the event of an emergency.
Whenever you’re moving to a new house, renovating, or in the aftermath of a natural disaster, you’ll need to know where you keep your four binders. I suggest keeping them in the same place where you store your Sunday Basket® so you can just grab it all and go!
I hope you found these three steps useful when it comes to living through renovations, moving to a new home, or recovering from a natural disaster. Purchase your Sunday Basket® and Binders in my shop today!
