If you need to reclaim your home office, or if your home office does double duty as a craft room, you’ll love this dramatic SORT and Succeed story.

Home Office/Craft Room Before Organizing

This home office organizing project is a classic before-and-after. The before isn’t due to a lack of space. It’s caused by a lack of time. We’ve got just one afternoon to whip this room back into a working office for this busy mom. Can we do it?

You can see, and you might recognize from your own home office, an attempt to organize with a tall wall unit (she gets a gold star) and lots of plastic bins (not my fave). This picture proves the point that if you try to organize with a bunch of plastic bins, your house is going to look like a bunch of plastic bins, not an organized home.

Theoretically, those plastic bins stack. In reality, they don’t stack very well, stuff gets thrown on top and they stop stacking at all, and they block the actual furniture and storage.

We’ve got to make some room by doing some heavy duty Sort and Succeed Step 2- Organize into groups. We used the hallway, the room next door, and the bed to sort all of the craft, work, school, and photo projects into their own batches. It might seem like slow going, but when you start to see space opening up in just one area, you can start to see how it might come together.

Look! An open cubby!

Time: The Missing Organizing Element

We didn’t throw much away. There were a lot of things that belonged elsewhere. We put clothes back in the closet, toys in the child’s room, and household items where they belonged in the rest of the house. There just hadn’t been time to do this before.

While we were sorting things on one side of the room, I was making a bee-line towards that desk in the back of the room. There was a lot of space going to waste back there, and a lot of the things on the floor really needed to be in the desk, which was blocked by all the–you guessed it–plastic bins. Once I made it back there, I was able to stock the shelves with all the supplies from the floor.

If you have a project like this at your home, you could be forgiven if you think you need to go buy something to fix this room. BUT PLEASE DON’T! You probably have everything you need to get organized. We always find a combination of unused organizing bins already on hand along with things that we can recycle to help us out, like these boxes that cards and jewelry came in.

These product brochures were literally all over the room when we started. Having them all in one place means you won’t have to order more because you’ve lost the original batch.

I’m not surprised at all that we found $160 in this room. Are you? I’m only surprised we didn’t find more.

Tote Bags Instead of Plastic Bins

Tote bags are probably the most under-utilized organizing tool. You usually keep them because you like the pattern or the event you attended. They are usually your style and favorite colors. Tote bags are so much better than–you guessed it–plastic bins. You can use a tote bag in surprising ways, like acting as shelf dividers. when you run out drawers, use a tote bag to hold your stash of sunglasses. Instead of piling them in, load them like you load silverware in the dishwasher, standing up on their ends. This makes it easier to find your favorite pair at a glance. You are solving two problems at once: how to store sunglasses AND what to do with that pretty tote bag! Why would someone need 20 pair? No judgement. If you have the room, keep them all. If you have an organizing system, you won’t need to keep buying more because you can’t find the ones you already own.

Home Office/Craft Room After Organizing

Look, I LOVE a big project like this, but there is only so much we can do in a single session. There is going to be some paperwork filing left over. But at least now we can get to the file cabinets! Filing isn’t such a chore if you don’t have to dig a tunnel to the cabinets.

Ready to see something you haven’t seen in a while? Carpet! And the home office chair!

I know it can feel overwhelming. But it is so worth it to have every room in your home available for you to work in and enjoy. Organizing isn’t about putting things in piles. It’s about turning your home into a place you love every day.

You Deserve 100%

You pay 100% of your rent or mortgage every month. Why not use and enjoy 100% of your home?

If you are waiting to get organized, I hope this project convinces you that you don’t need more bins, and you don’t need more…anything…to reclaim your home office right now.

SORT and Succeed

I hope that the 5-step SORT and Succeed system can be your guide through your organizing projects, whether they are small drawer organizing projects or big projects to reclaim a room like this. Here are those five steps for SORT and Succeed again. 

See all the 2021 January GO Month projects in one place.

Does this project make you want to tackle your own home office/craft room? Please comment below.