A lot of thought is usually given to decorating a house. People spend days and months planning out every room, from the color scheme to the type of furniture and their placement. However, the real elegance to a house comes from its tidiness, which is often a neglected activity, especially if there are more family members especially kids. Cleaning up the clutter in a house and reorganizing things is not as difficult or daunting as it may seem initially. The thumb rule for saving time looking for things, and organizing everything that is there in the house is to be able to tell, at all points of time, where you could find something in the house, for example, if you are looking for a bill or a particular book or an ornament, you should be able to point out to the drawer or the cabinet where you could search it for. Getting the house to this stage is really a matter of initial effort and then the discipline to avoid piling junk anywhere and everywhere. When you start tidying up, the best thing to do is to separate out important stuff, from those you are not sure you would need and those you surely do not need. At the end of the exercise, the carton with things that do not need should go. The same holds when you are buying something that looks tempting. You must really think if you need it and have a place to put it. Although most of us find it hard to throw away things, it is better we get rid of them if we haven't needed them for more than a year. In all likelihood we wouldn't need them going forward. Using drawers with many smaller compartments also helps to sort out things, so we don't end up wasting time on busier days searching for whatever that is that we need.