The Home Edit: Stay Organized: The Ultimate Guide to Making Systems Stick

by Clea Shearer, Joanna Teplin

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The organizational gurus from Home Edit are back to help you simplify your system for sustained organizational success. Complete with tips, tricks and plenty of checklists, this is perfect for anyone who struggles to stay on top of cleaning.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the authors of The Home Edit and The Home Edit Life and hosts of the Netflix series Get Organized with The Home Edit, comes a guide to the most important phase of getting organized: staying that way.

It's one thing to get organized, but how do you make those systems stick? The Home Edit Stay Organized takes the intimidation and hesitation out of the maintenance involved to prevent you from abandoning your once-tidied systems or maybe help you to get organized in the first place!

When you have a system that works, maintenance is a breeze. Think of a silverware drawer: It's obvious where each utensil goes, and so everyone in your house should know how to move the forks from the dishwasher to their spot. Often, when you’re struggling to keep your home tidy, it’s because your system is too complex and needs some tweaking—and this book will dig deeper to show you how. Throughout the book, Clea and Joanna reveal the important habits, debunk the myths, address the setbacks of being organized, and new and exclusive images show you how to tackle the hardest and trickiest spaces in each room in order to create a home that's organized for the long term. 

With inventory checklists, tips for getting the whole family on board to help, fans' frequently asked questions, and more, The Home Edit Stay Organized will help you move forward feeling calm, collected, and confidently organized—with humor, relatability, and beautiful imagery to enjoy along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593581698
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	09/19/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	30,664
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

The stars of Mastering the Mess and Get Organized with The Home Edit, Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin founded The Home Edit with the goal of merging conventional organization and interior design. With clients all over the country, they offer both full and virtual services through their website. They have also been featured in People, House Beautiful, and Architectural Digest and on Goop, among other places. They are the authors of the New York Times bestseller The Home Edit and The Home Edit Life. Clea and Joanna live with their families in Nashville, Tennessee.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Raise your hand if you’ve ever filled an entire shopping cart with clear bins, turntables, and sets of canisters in each size, expecting them to transform your life overnight, but the items still ended up where they didn’t belong.

Or if you’ve scrolled through our Instagram feed, taking screenshots of pantries and closets with items perfectly arranged in rainbow order, having every intention to re-create the look at home, only for those images to become buried deep within your camera roll because you think, “Why put in all that effort if my kids are just going to mess it up?”

Which could be why you decided to pick up this book in the first place. You want to be organized but can’t seem to get there or stay there. Here’s the truth: If you want your systems to stick, you have to make organizing a lifestyle. Embracing that reality is the only answer.

But don’t worry. We’re not here to make you feel guilty, lazy, or bad about yourself. Rather, we’re here to help you get back on track and be your biggest cheerleaders. (Just don’t be alarmed if one of us attempts a toe touch at some point.)

Do our homes ever get messy? Yes, of course they do! Every house gets messy, particularly when you add spouses, children, and pets—i.e., any living, breathing creature who is not you. But what we are quick to tell people is that, while our houses get messy, they never get disorganized . . . and that’s something different. Once you have smart systems that can flex over time, it’s not hard to stay on track.

Maintenance is not one and done. We have found over the years that people are . . . not totally in love with that reality. Sure, it’s tempting to set up a system and forget it, but hello? Do you live in a museum? Maintenance is the answer to organizing, and the thought of staying organized is what impedes many people from getting organized in the first place. And we promise you it’s not as hard or scary as you think it is!


So, Let's Talk About How to Use This Book

The chapters that follow will take you through the spaces in your house, on a journey from what is typically the easiest spot (the entry) to the most challenging (the garage). You might already know how much we love a gold star, so we’ve given the entry a 1-gold-star rating and the garage a 9-star rating. (We wanted to give the garage 25 stars because that’s how much we dislike organizing the garage, but we’re nothing if not consistent.) As you use this book, are we suggesting you reward yourself with the appropriate number of stars after you revive each space? Oh, 100 percent.

What this book is: a user-friendly guide, divided by room, complete with checklists and scripts to help you stay organized once you already did the work of getting organized. If you haven’t started organizing yet, this book will get you there.

What this book isn’t: a report card. No one will be graded here! If you’ve been on this wild ride with us long enough, you know that we are very good at exactly one thing. Organizing. Don’t ask us to craft, or cook you dinner, or go outside and play catch. No, like seriously . . . you’d quickly regret it. And just as we can’t tell you the square root of 9 (no matter how many times you repeat the question, or even explain the concept), we don’t expect you to look at a space and immediately know how you’ve gone off the rails. Leave that part to the experts. Us! If you try not to judge us about the math thing, we promise not to judge your closets. Deal? Deal.

If you use this book as intended, you will end up with systems that stick for every room. And if (more like when) things start to slip, pick this book back up again. Or skip to the end of each chapter, where we give you Low-Bar Lifestyle Long-Term Goals, aka your future-focused reality check. Because life is messy. But if you’re honest with yourself and are willing to do just a little bit every day, it never needs to get disorganized.

Editorial Reviews

07/01/2023

Organizing gurus and influencers Shearer and Teplin (The Home Edit Life) return with their latest book in "The Home Edit" lifestyle series. Their previous books introduced readers to the authors' organizing philosophy on arranging items in the home to regulate busy lives. This book focuses on maintaining organizational systems throughout various rooms in the home, starting from easiest (entry) to hardest (garage). Each chapter contains checklists, scripts, and a "Low-Bar Lifestyle Long-Term Goals" section to assist readers in creating their own personal organizational systems that can be modified as the family's needs change. The organizing basics of edit, categorize, contain, and maintain are discussed. The book also demonstrates how to incorporate household habits into a visually pleasing, organized system that is simple for all household members to maintain. While most concepts mentioned in the book are self-explanatory, it would have benefited from further explanations of the terms "backstock" and the "80/20 rule" for the readers who don't follow the authors on social media. But the photos in this book are Instagram-worthy. VERDICT An easy-to-read, judgment-free book for readers who want to tackle intimidating home organization projects.—Aspasia Luster

Library Journal