These quick tips will give you ideas to help you make your bathroom as romantic as you can stand it.

1. Soft finishes, in the form of soft rugs and fluffy towels, can take the edge off a bathroom filled with hard surfaces such as porcelain fixtures and ceramic tiles. Pick fabrics and rugs with soft pastel colors and patterns for a truly romantic feeling.

2. Intricate shelf brackets on bathroom shelves can give you a simple but effective way to increase the romanticism of your bathroom. Spray paint them in shiny chrome or soft white or cream and top with a delicate scalloped wood shelf painted in a soft creamy pastel.

3. Use fabric covered boxes in a stack of two or three for eye appeal. Make sure you use soft colors and ribbon or fabric trims. This is also good storage space for your bathroom supplies, like extra soaps, cotton balls ,and Q-Tips.

4. Hanging a glamorous chandelier over your bathtub or in the center of the room also adds a romantic touch to your decor. If your electrical wiring setup doesn’t allow for this kind of fixture, just hang a chandelier that uses candles. Or put a delicate crystal lamp with a romantic shade in your bathroom. Dangling crystal teardrops will add a perfectly romantic touch to almost any simple shade.

5. Display softly colored bath salts, soaps, and lotions in your bathroom for some more visual oomph.

Romantic has never looked so good!

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5 Quick Tips for a Romantic Bathroom

When you’re working in your kitchen, you need easy access to the things you use regularly. Easy access depends entirely on knowing where your items are, without having to stop and think about where they might be.

When you’re putting away groceries, you want to be able to put items in their place quickly and without having to think about it too much, but just as importantly, you want items to be easy to find later.

If putting groceries away isn’t quick and easy, disorganization will creep back in and overwhelm you just when you most need to find something.

Kitchen organizing doesn’t have to take long at all. If you do it over a period of a week or two, you’ll be amazed at how organized things will get after just 15 minutes here and there.

Doing it the simple way: organizing as you go

1. The next time you put away groceries, put canned foods on one shelf—or use two if absolutely necessary—and slide your vegetables to the left and your fruit to the right. Put boxed goods in a central location.

Group items together that you use together, such as baking goods. I also put my themed foods together, such as tex-mex, spaghetti & sauce, boxed side dishes (scalloped potatoes, instant potatoes, quick rice dishes, etc.). It makes everything easy to find and easy to put away.

As you take items out of your pantry and use them, you can take a few minutes here and there to put items into their new locations. With almost no extra effort, you’ve begun to organize your pantry space.

2. Don’t scatter your kitchen gadgets around your kitchen. Locate them in a centralized location, even if it’s a little out of your workflow.

If you spend thirty seconds walking across the kitchen to get your super-duper-potato-slicer or your handy-cheese-grater, that’s okay. At least you know where it’s at and you won’t spend 2 to 4 minutes looking for it or trying to remember where you put it last.

Next time you take your gadget out of the dishwasher, put it with the majority of your other gadgets. Soon, you’ll have them all in one location.

3. Hide everything that you can. Not only will you have clearer counters, you’ll have cleaner utensils, cookbooks, and gadgets. As long as you know where you put things and put them there every time, accessibility isn’t hindered. In fact, you could be helping yourself out if you have a habit of stacking things on your small appliances.

Anything stored near the stove requires extra wash time because of oil and grease deposits. Have you saved yourself any effort by keeping your toaster on your counter? Sure, you save about 1 minute getting it out and putting it away, but you’ll spend countless minutes over the course of a month cleaning it—same for your cookbooks.

Even if you use your cookbooks extensively, don’t keep your cookbooks in an open shelf in your kitchen. Grease and other deposits will stick to the books and you’ll end up cleaning them often, or wishing you had the time to do so! Keep them as far away from the cooking areas as you can. I keep mine on a dedicated shelf in my pantry.

The next time you wipe down your counters, grab up your small appliances and gadgets and tuck them away (a clutter free house looks cleaner). If you don’t have space to tuck them away, consider moving anything you use less than 4 times a year to a longer term storage area.

4. So you would love to do steps 1 through 3, but you don’t have any space? Next time you put away your dishes, clear out any older, unused dishware from your cabinets first. Donate to Goodwill, or give to a relative or friend who might want them.

I started out as a young married woman with many hand-me-downs, and I was always excited to have something “new.”

You can clear out plenty of old dishware in less than 5 minutes, if you grab a box and start packing.

5. Throw out old food and make room for what you really use.

The next time you go to put something into the freezer, grab at least two items that have been in there too long and then throw them out.

You cannot leave food in a freezer indefinitely and expect it to taste good later, or even be safe for eating. By throwing out older items (or just things you know you’ll never get around to preparing or reheating), you’ll create extra space for what you will use. It takes just seconds to pick up something and throw it into the trash.

Within a few weeks, you’ll have an up-to-date selection of frozen items and you won’t even notice the time you spent organizing it!

6. Get rid of duplicates.

I’ve already written an entire article about this topic, but it’s so powerful, I want to mention it again.

The next time you put away a gadget, utensil, or pot or pan, notice if you have more than one of the item. Really think for a second about whether or not you make use of the second item on a semi-regular basis.

If not, consider what your life might be like without the item. Will you suffer because you don’t have one of them? Will someone else appreciate having your extra?

In just a few minutes, you can clear out additional space for other items without sacrificing anything of note.

As I’ve said before, organizing is really about having the space to keep things in a particular spot so you know where you can find them, without having to think about it.

Practice a few of these tips each day and before you know it, you’ll have a more organized kitchen in almost no time at all!

Post from: Home Management Tips

6 Quick Kitchen Organizing Tips

You might have noticed that sometimes it takes ten minutes to get into and out of the grocery store for a gallon of milk and dozen eggs, and other times it takes twice as long. These ten minute gaps of time can add up to a wasted hour or more of time in an average morning of errands.

For me, Monday mornings around 8:30 a.m. have the biggest payoff of time saved. The stores are emptier, the check out lines are shorter, the traffic is lighter, and I’m able to get my errands out of the way and off my mind for the rest of the week. Friday afternoons and evenings are the worst, and I always do my best to avoid running any errands at that time.

Sometimes the region of the country you live in can determine when is the best time to run your errands, but there are a few things you can do no matter where you live to get in and out quickly.

Make a list and carry it with you. At the top of the list write down all your errands, so you don’t forget any of them and have to backtrack. Also, list them in the order they’ll occur on your route unless they’re dependent on another stop first.

Next on your list, write down what you need to pick up or deliver to each location. That might only be your grocery items and pharmacy items, or it might include documents you need to drop off somewhere, grocery, pharmacy, and beauty items, appointments, and gifts you need to buy.

By having all this on one piece of paper, you eliminate forgetfulness and save yourself plenty of time–enough to more than compensate you for the time spent organizing your list.

Get out of the house early. If you want to get done with your errands quickly, you’ll want to beat everyone else to the stores, the bank, and everywhere else!

If you try these quick tips, I’m sure you’ll recapture some of your lost time on errand day.

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Timing is key to reducing wasted efforts

You can instantly see results when you get rid of junk that’s sitting around on counters and tables. Here’s a quick tip.

Sweeping the floors is the simplest way to get rid of floor clutter. Take your broom and sweep up anything in your way, including shoes, toys–anything at all that’s in the floor but shouldn’t be. Then pick out the items you absolutely must keep and put them away. Seriously consider leaving the toys, because it’ll teach your children a valuable lesson about picking up and putting away their things! Throw out the trash and you’ll be amazed at what having a clear floor and clear counters and tables will do for your room.

Without something for your eye to catch on as you view the room, everything will look much more clean and tidy, even if you haven’t done more than pick up all the junk.

Although the authors of It’s Here…Somewhere go to extremes to save money, the principles behind their method as outlined in the book is the best I’ve ever tried. I still use it today to keep my own home streamlined of clutter and excess. Only used copies are available these days because the book has gone out of print, but if you need inspiration to get you started on the path to clutter free living, you’ll want to get a copy of this book.

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A clutter-free house looks cleaner