You guys we are beyond excited to be hosting week 3 of our weekly link-up with a group of rad husband and wife teams we connected with this year at Haven. If you are feeling kinda lost as to what exactly a link up is don’t even worry, we were completely confused too! But now that we’re in week three we are starting to feel like experts. Each week alongside our crew we will be sharing some of our favorite tips and tricks all centered around the monthly topic. We want to see your best ideas, tips and tricks too!

To get in on the action, all you have to do is drop your link to any blog posts, photos, or videos at the end for this post. Then everyone who stops by can see all the things you do too!

Here are the Party House to Home Haven Rules:

Link to a relevant topic
Link to a specific post, not a homepage
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Let’s meet our crew

We’d like to introduce you to a few husband and wife friends. Meet Lindsey and Chris from Building Bluebird, Sarah and Nick from Nestrs, Morgan and Jamie from Construction 2 Style and Katelynn and Uriah from The Inspiring Investment.

We’re calling our weekly link-up party: House to Home Haven! Join the fun over on IG too #housetohomehaven.

5 AREAS TO ORGANIZE FOR A MORE FUNCTIONAL LIFE AND HOME image 1

In case you are just joining us last let’s catch you up. Last week we chatted about 5 diy budget friendly tips to keeping your closets organized and the week before that we talked about 7 ways to declutter and organize your life!

Each week we’ll be taking turns hosting the weekly link-up, but don’t worry… we’ll be reminding you over here where to link your content up every week.

Back to school is in full swing over here. Both boys have started and are excited to be back hanging with kids their age all day. So, we’ve been busy trying to make our home feel as organized and functional as possible. When everything has its own home life really seems to run smoother. Today we’ve put together a list of five areas at our home we keep organized to make our life more functional.

Refrigerator

Cleaning out our refrigerator is a weekly ordeal over here. We like to clean out anything we haven’t used or eaten, and wipe down the inside before we do our weekly shopping. While this might seem over the top it actually helps us maintain a refrigerator that everyone can see inside and find things in. To keep our routine going strong we like to precut fruits and vegetables for the week. We store them in see-through containers for easy access for everyone in our house. This promotes healthy snacking options for everyone as well as independence when it comes to breakfast and lunch choices.

When it comes to our freezer that is more of a monthly upkeep. We like to take everything out to know exactly what has been collecting in there to ensure we use everything we have. This can also be a huge cost savings, it helps us plan meals around what we already have instead of buying new things every single week.

Pantry

Keeping our pantry clean and organized is our key to independence for both boys. Having a spot for everything inside the pantry not only allows us to know what we have it helps the boys become independent for snacks and breakfast. We keep our shelving organized inside baskets. This way all the food is contained in specific spots. The bottom shelves are food items we are ok with our kids having access to, while the higher shelving we keep for foods they don’t need to have their hands on daily or meal prep items.

Master Bedroom Closet

This is a huge one for us. Having our closet organized not only makes our morning routine run smoother it helps keep us sane. Literally the mess that can collect inside our closet could give anyone anxiety! We are big fans of the felt hangers. We love having actual space between each piece of clothing. This allows us to see what we have and make sure we aren’t collecting more clothing items than we need. Yes, we are totally those people who color coordinate our closet space. We like to break it down by color and style of clothing. So all long sleeves go together and all short sleeves go together, you get the idea. Don’t knock this till you’ve tried it. We promise this organization will minimize your time inside your closet, hunting for something to wear and make putting your close away easy.

Entryway/Mudroom Area/Coat Closet

This one was tricky to label. But that area we are talking about is the dumping ground in your home. We all have that spot where things collect from our bags, coats, backpack, shoes and then in the winter months it’s all the gear. So let’s get a hold of this area before then. Hooks are key for us, they allow everyone to place their items there and whether it’s a coat or a bag the hook keeps the area organized and functional. Baskets are our next best friend. We love how baskets can house shoes, bags, hats and mittens. In our collect all area we like to keep a command center, a place for the boys to drop off their things from the school day, for us to keep the mail, and a way to organize all the business paperwork and files. This can also be a great place for keys and monthly calendars.

Playroom

If you’ve got kids our guess is you have some form of play area. Maybe it isn’t an entire room but we know you’ve got to have a place for all their things. So let’s break down our favorite ways to keep this room organized and functional. BASKETS!!!! Yes, all the baskets. We love having each basket dedicated to specific types of toys. This way our kids can independently pick up. Yes, there is some training involved in this process, and no our kids don’t pick up after themselves all the time and of course we have to help. But with that being said having an organized playroom does allow for the organizational chaos to occur with more independence in the clean up process. We also love to hang our pretend play clothing up. We simply used a towel bar with mini hangers as our clothes rack. Our dudes can’t hang the clothing independently yet but they can now find all the clothing we have for pretend play.