Jennifer Castenson: Hi! I am Jennifer with Organized Living, and today we are showing you how to create an efficient storage space. And now I am going to show you a few techniques to get started. Let's talk about why you want to be organized. First of all, it saves you time. You will have more time to do the things that you enjoy. Second of all, it will save you money. If you are organized, you are much less likely to lose bills around the house or to buy duplicates of things that you already have. Then you will be more productive, you won't have to spend the time rummaging through clutter in order to find what you need. And finally, less stuff equals less stress. Now I am going to use a technique that a lot of professional organizers use. We use an acronym called SPACE. Space is Sort, Purge, Assign a home, Containerize, and Evaluate. So we will be doing Sort and Purge at the same time. First you want to sort the items; like-items together from your storage space. For a closet that means putting all of your jeans together, all of your shirts together, all your sweaters together, and as you are doing that you will notice that you will have a lot of like-items that you will be able to purge. We have a bin over here that's Donate. You can see that I have taken out some items, for instance, I found some heels that I don't use anymore, a bag, a scarf and some other miscellaneous items. Then you will have another bin, and it is easier if you label them, and this one says Belongs Elsewhere. There are things that I found in my closet that obviously don't belong. I found mail in my closet, DVDs and yarn. These things need to be located elsewhere in the house. So I have put them in this bin which is easy to transport.

And now I want to show you one last Purge technique. When you are putting your clothes back in the closet, put all the hangers backwards. And in 6 months time, if you haven't put the hanger back the right way, you will know it is time to get rid of that piece of clothing. And now let's look at the last three letters of our SPACE acronym in the pantry. Come on. Now that we are in the pantry, we are going to talk about Assigning a home. You will want to keep -- in the pantry you want to keep big bulky items down low, heavy and bulky items down low, such as potatoes and onions or rice; larger bags of rice. Items that you use infrequently up high, up here we have stored our holiday plates. Items that you use frequently, on a daily basis, you want to keep easy to access. For instance, we have our snacks and flour right at eye level. Additionally, you want to keep all items at the same height together. For instance, here we have put all of our snack boxes together, cracker boxes together, which is a more efficient use of the space. Next, we are going to talk about the C in SPACE which is Containerize. Here we have used containers to store a lot of our goods in the pantry, everything from beans to noodles and snacks. We use containers because they are clear, you can see how much you have left of each item, and they keep things neat and organized. In addition you can use stackable containers like this to make better use of vertical space. Finally, let's talk about the E in SPACE, which is Evaluate. A month after you have setup your system you can evaluate it and see how it is working. It should be easy to maintain because it reflects your needs. So now go visit your laundry room, make sure everything is still organized and working efficiently. Then get out to your garage and make sure you are tripping over anything that you organized a month ago. And come back to your pantry and make sure everything is still in order. These techniques should work everywhere in your home. Congratulations! Today, you have learned how to create an organized storage space and how to maintain it. Now it is time to sit back, relax and enjoy.