Before you begin to clean your kids mess, take a look around your home. Has your child taken over the house? Are there clothes and toys everywhere? Well, it’s not your child’s fault. Most children create messes easily, but when the house has reached a messy state they can become easily overwhelmed and may not have the skills needed to clean up the large mess. However, these skills can be learned over time. The first thing you need to do is help teach your child the skills they need to become a bit more organized. Begin to clean your kids’ mess by collecting a few supplies.

The first step to cleaning your kids’ mess will be to collect various boxes and bins, a timer, some paper to take notes, a lot of time, and the ability to be patient with your child.

You need to take a look at one individual room at a time. Make sure that you start with a room that is not too overwhelming for your child to handle. Have your child look at the mess in the room and decide if they can distinguish categories of items. Make a list of all the items that might be in the piles. You can look for clothes, books, toys etc. Take out one of the bins and give it to your child along with the labeled note card. Set the timer for five minutes and challenge your child to get all of the like objects together in the bin by the end of the time. Turn cleaning your kids mess into a fun game. If they associate cleaning with fun, they will be more likely to do it in the future.

Then you can divide the room up into sections and race your child to see who can organize that section the fastest. Another strategy to cleaning your kids mess will be to set up a “basketball game.” Have your child try to throw toys into a basket and give them a point for the most toys that made it into a basket. After a while of playing the game, pick up the remaining toys that shouldn’t be thrown and put them away.

Always be able to help your child if they get overwhelmed with the cleaning process. Provide help and support to your child and show them that being clean and organized can be fun! Working with your child, and giving him or her a proper respect for their things and their home will ensure that in time they learn to clean up their own messes.

Once you’d rid yourself of any excess, walk through your home and examine all of your storage space. Do you have enough, not enough? If you don’t have enough storage space, either you need to get rid of more stuff, or you need to come up with a new storage solution. You can add shelves in one of the rooms, purchase a stand-alone wardrobe, work in some storage space in the garage — just know going in if you’re not going to be able to fit everything into your closets that you currently have in there.

Then take stock of everything in all of your closets. Get it all in one mountainous pile, if need be. Pay attention to what you currently store in your closets, and consider how often you use it, and what you use it to do.

In order to keep things neat, it is critical to ensure that everything has a place. Otherwise, there’s no specific spot to put it away in. Also, try to keep things close to where you use them, so that fetching an object and putting it away isn’t an enormous hassle. Remember, the harder it is to put something away, the more likely we are to put off the putting away.

Then, examine the rooms and areas around each closet. The entryway closet should have a very different utility, most likely, than the upstairs closet in the guest room. For example, umbrellas should probably be kept close to either door. Although, if those closets are especially small or especially full, and rain comes very seldom in your part of the world, this may not be true for you.

Always keep in mind that utility is about you and your needs, not about what the creators of the item thought that it was best used for. This is what you should be thinking about during every step of the reorganization process.

Don’t forget while taking stock of closet space any unused vertical space. And remember that clothing rods can be removed. Just because the previous occupants used the entryway closet as a coat closet doesn’t mean that you have to. If you’re worried about losing a place for the coats, but need the space for other things, you can always consider a free-standing option such as a coat tree.

View every space with regard to its total possibilities, not its past uses, and you will find a world of opportunities. A great example of this is floor space. We had a real problem in our front closet, until we installed a short free-standing shelf there to organize everything that ended up on the floor. Now, it is easy to find whatever we need.

Just keep these concepts in mind and your closets should be clutter-free!