I’ve mentioned in the past just how much I love cleaning. To be terribly blunt, I don’t. I work hard at keeping our house in a reasonably organized state, but I struggle. Of course, the fact that I often get new products to review can make organization even more difficult and I find that I end up going through phases in which I spend days in a row cleaning and organizing the household only to find it descending into disorganization a month later.

I needed a plan. I needed a way to keep my house organized once I’d taken the first steps. But I had no idea how to make that goal a reality. Then Barbara Reich came to my rescue with her new book Secrets of an Organized Mom. Barbara shared her knowledge recently with a great guest post about spring-cleaning here on Mommy Kat and Kids and I couldn’t wait to see what kind of information her book might have for me.

The first thing that appealed to me about Secrets of an Organized Mom was the simplicity of Barbara’s organizing method. The road to organization, says Barbara, can be summed up in four words: purge, design, organize and maintain. Immediately I could see that a big part of the reason I was struggling with the fourth step, maintaining order, was because I had often ignored the first step and always ignored the second. Organization simply doesn’t last if a room has too much filling it and the design isn’t functional for a family! [Read more…]