By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Ready to Spring forward? Time Change Sunday is on the way!

On Sunday, March 14, Daylight Savings Time will begin in most of the United States. Setting the clock forward means it's time for a seasonal safety check!

As you circle the house, setting clocks ahead, make time for this short safety checklist. It'll see you into Spring from a safe--and organized--home:

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

It's Spring!

Warming breezes scour the last of winter from house and garden. Spring rain awakens the earth and calls forth new life.

Meet the rising sap with a new broom. Spring clean indoors and out to prepare home and hearth for the return of warm weather.

Our Spring cleaning chore checklist will help you take care of important seasonal chores and welcome Spring to an organized home:

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Spring cleaning is on the horizon, and you could use some help. 

Many hands make light work ... so how do you get the kids to pitch in when it's time to spring-clean the house? 

Try these five tips to involve children with housecleaning chores:

It's downright lonely to be sentenced to clean a bathroom on your own, but paired with a parent, even a 5-year-old can work safely and happily. While Dad wields the bowl cleaner and the tile brush, his helper can scrub the sink, polish the fixtures, empty the trash and trundle towels and rugs to the laundry room. 

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

On any trip to the grocery store, it's the first and simplest question:  what's the price?

Time was, it was easy to know the price of any grocery item; before computers, each can, carton and bottle sported a physical price tag.  To increase prices, grocers had to re-tag food items, a labor-intensive process that made food costs clear and minimized wide swings in pricing.

Hello, 21st century!  Today's computer-powered POS systems allow grocery stores to change item prices with a few keystrokes at the home office.  Last week's $2.49 bottle of salad dressing?  Today, it'll cost you $3.69!  

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

With food prices soaring and energy costs at record highs, it's time for an energy-saving tune up for your refrigerator and freezer.

Keeping food fresh--while conserving energy--can bring a helpful boost to the strained food budget.

Try these tips to minimize energy use and save money on groceries:

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

It's silent. It's sneaky. It creeps about in corners: clutter!

When the state of the house aggravates you to your last nerve, it's tempting to launch an all-out battle in the war against clutter.  First, though, know your enemy! 

There are as many reasons for household clutter as there are clutterers. As Pogo says, "We have seen the enemy, and he is us!"

Take aim on your household's clutter problem by going to the root of the problem: your own thinking.  

What's your clutter personality ... and which of these internal voices strikes a chord?

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Paid cleaning help can be a wonderful short-cut to a clean and organized home--if the household budget can stand the cost.

But what do you do if the Prize Patrol bypassed your door this year?

Take a speed-cleaning lesson from the pros! Paid cleaning services are masters of the art of speedy, efficient cleaning. They don't waste time, cut corners or dawdle over the job--and they know how to clean fast, clean right.

Take a tip from their copybook. To clean your house in record time, try these tips from professional cleaners:

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Who among us hasn't squandered a happy afternoon in a store specializing in organizing products? Drifting from aisle to aisle, we make a mental list: this for the bathroom clutter, that for the computer desk. 

All is bliss until we consider the bottom line. Specialty organizers can be costly! Someday, we vow, we'll get organized at home, but for now, budget realities step firmly on organizer dreams. 

Stop the presses! Over the years, these top tools have proved their value, and they cost a fraction of the price of specialty products. Everyday products from office supply and discount stores can take us 80% of the way to total home organization--for 20% of the price. It's a frugal application of the 80/20 rule.

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Do you know where your tax records are? Chances are, they're swimming in a stack of paper ... somewhere.

Rafts of paper flood into the average home each day. The mailbox discharges letters and bills and bank statements. Briefcases explode with professional journals, pay stubs and calendars. School backpacks unload children's artwork, meeting notices and sports schedules.

Paper clutter costs money, time and stress. A missing permission slip derails the entire family on the way out the door. Hide-and-seek bills lead to late payment fees. Lose the roster, and it's back to the Yellow Pages each time you need to contact the soccer car pool.

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The tax man cometh: do you know where your tax records are? Chances are, they're swimming in a stack of paper ... somewhere.

Rafts of paper flood into the average home each day. The mailbox discharges letters and bills and bank statements. Briefcases explode with professional journals, pay stubs and calendars. School backpacks unload children's artwork, meeting notices and sports schedules.

Paper clutter costs money, time and stress. A missing permission slip derails the entire family on the way out the door. Hide-and-seek bills lead to late payment fees. Lose the roster, and it's back to the Yellow Pages each time you need to contact the soccer car pool.

Without a plan for paper management, a household can drown in a rising tide of paper. Take back your time with these simple tips to pull the plug on paper clutter:

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Wheeling my shopping cart down the aisle at the supermarket this week, I was forced to take notice that it was, indeed, football season. With my attention distracted by a flashing soda display, my cart crashed into the corner of a miniature football field, constructed entirely out of beer cases. What deranged hearts and minds live in the person of advertising executives!

Untangling my cart (and trying, unobtrusively, to shove the cases back into line before anyone noticed that I'd creamed the goalpost), it occurred to me that I could learn a lot about goals from football players.

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Think about it! The refrigerator holds it all: food and finance, weight and well-being, organization and chaos, all rolled into one big cold box. Dive into that baby with a detached eye, a hardened heart and one small hour of time and you're on the road to weight loss, better household management, and a healthier budget.

The timing couldn't be better, because I know what your refrigerator looks like! Plastic food storage containers pile in unsteady ziggurats in every corner--and why is it that the largest bowls and boxes hold the smallest amounts of food?

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It's January. Standing in line at the supermarket check stand, nobody can deny that we're on the dreary downside of a new year. Tabloid headlines scream the weight-loss secrets of the stars, while traditional women's magazine covers sing siren songs of money-saving, belly-busting, speed-cleaning tips, tricks and techniques.

We ourselves? All those resolutions that looked so basic, so easy, so noble through the champagne haze of New Year's Eve have lost their rosy glow viewed in the stark light of a morning cup of coffee. With the children back to school and holiday decorations back in their attic boxes, our resolve for a better, thinner, healthier and wealthier year has once more washed up against the hard and niggling realities of daily life.

Be of good cheer! There's a tried-and-true boost for just about anybody's New Year's resolutions. [I'm talking garden-variety resolutions here: weight loss, financial prudence, better home or personal organization. If you've vowed that this is the year you read the Russians, my hat's off to you but you're on your own!]

I'm talking about cleaning the refrigerator. Spearing the Great White Whale.

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It's the magic night: a new decade dawns at midnight! 

Along with the balloons and streamers come the New Years' Resolutions--it's as much a part of the celebration as the noisemakers! Will you resolve to get organized, lose weight, bring order to your home? 

This year, resolve to keep those resolutions, not just make them! Try these tips from sister site Organized Christmas to make New Years' Resolutions a vehicle for real personal change: 

New Year, New You: Keeping New Years' Resolutions

Don't miss the free printable New Years' Resolutions tracker:  

New Years' Resolutions Tracker

It's the magic night: a new decade dawns at midnight! Along with the balloons and streamers come the New Years' Resolutions--it's as much a part of the celebration as the noisemakers!

Will you resolve to get organized, lose weight, bring order to your home? This year, resolve to keep those resolutions, not just make them! Try these tips from sister site Organized Christmas to make New Years' Resolutions a vehicle for real personal change:

New Year, New You: Keeping New Years' Resolutions

Don't miss the free printable New Years' Resolutions tracker:

New Years' Resolutions Tracker

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Christmas is here, and New Year's Eve is on the horizon! Even in the midst of holiday cheer, it's time to look ahead to a clean and organized New Year.

Ready to swing into the coming year from a clutter-free and organized home? Try these year-end tips to cut clutter and start the New Year on an organized note:

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Christmas is here, and New Year's Eve is on the horizon! Even in the midst of holiday cheer, it's time to look ahead to a clean and organized New Year.

Ready to swing into the coming year from a clutter-free and organized home? Try these year-end tips to cut clutter and start the New Year on an organized note:

Santa's Rule: Get One, Toss Two

Try this simple idea to pack a powerful clutter-cutting punch as you put away new holiday gifts: for each gift received, toss two counterparts.

As you put away holiday gifts, take time to make extra room throughout the house. For example, for every new Christmas DVD you add to the shelves, remove two older titles. Did Nana gift the children with new holiday pajamas? Find two outgrown sets to add to the donation bag. If craft supplies made it into your stocking, be sure to remove double their number from your stash before adding them to the craft closet.

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Cleaning got you down? Clean house fast with the 2010 New Year Grand Plan Challenge from OrganizedHome.Com.

Based on Katie Leckey's Cleaning Grand Plan, The New Year Grand Plan Challenge kicks off the new year with a 14-week plan to clean and organize a spring-clean house for the New Year. 

Working in small weekly bites makes a big job easy, while printable forms help organize and track cleaning chores. By Spring, you'll be ready for outdoor fun.

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Cleaning got you down? Clean house fast with the 2010 New Year Grand Plan Challenge from OrganizedHome.Com.

Based on Katie Leckey's Cleaning Grand Plan, The New Year Grand Plan Challenge kicks off the new year with a 14-week plan to clean and organize a spring-clean house for the New Year. Working in small weekly bites makes a big job easy, while printable forms help organize and track cleaning chores. By Spring, you'll be ready for outdoor fun.

The 2010 New Year Grand Plan Challenge begins on January 10, with a preview week for lists and questions beginning January 3. Read the complete plan here, or use the week-by-week links below. Each week, we'll work through a different area of the home together.

Track your progress with spring cleaning checklists from the Organized Home Forms Library.

Ready? Set? Let's clean house for the new year!

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By Cynthia Ewer
Editor, Organized Home
Author, Houseworks: How to Live Clean, Green and Organized at Home

Face it: it's January. Dreary weather is matched only by the dreariness of a house stripped of holiday decorations. Children slog through the great dull stretch between New Year's Day and Spring Break, no longer distracted from their schoolwork by the excitements of the holiday season.

December's crowded calendar gives way to January's social slump. Video rentals soar as comfy sweats replace dress clothes on Saturday nights.

Take heart! There's another side to January!

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