When we moved into our home nearly 4 months ago, I was just trying to stay afloat. Can you relate? Things were still in boxes, we were trying to keep track of important documents, receipts, and miscellaneous paperwork and my nightstand ended up becoming the dumping ground for “all the important stuff.” But when everything is important, nothing is important, right? So when I finally decided that my nightstand organization was bumping up to the top of my to-do list, I had a terrible mess in front of me. Luckily, it didn’t take long to fix the problem and now my nights and early mornings are so much more relaxing!
We purchased our nightstands from World Market (Aiden collection) a few months ago and love them so much. Our love is probably more from the fact that we have actual nightstands after nearly 8 years of marriage than anything! We didn’t want anything too elaborate. We both knew we wanted at least one drawer and either a shelf for a basket or cabinet to store books. This is what we ended up with.
However, over the course of about 3 months it had turned into this.
Not so pretty, huh? And definitely not functional. I knew there was a ton of items that needed to go, but I honestly didn’t realize how little I really needed to keep in this space.
I started by emptying everything out of the drawer and basket. I then sorted things into four piles: throw away, donate/purge, relocate, and keep. Of the 4 piles, the only items that went back in this space were the ones that landed in the keep pile. I was ruthless when purging this space. I didn’t want to store anything in this space that I didn’t need on a regular basis beside my bed. My keep pile turned out to be the smallest of the four piles I had!
In the drawer, I kept my Bible and devotional closest to my bed. I also kept my headphones. I used 3 drawer dividers I had leftover after reorganizing my kitchen drawers to contain the rest of the items. in the front I keep my pens and pencils. In the back on the left, I keep chapstick as well as a few cough drops. On the right I have my bottle of perfume and my most worn jewelry.
The bottom basket contains 3-4 books I’m currently working through, the Bible I take back and forth to church, a few notepads, a deck of cards that my husband and I use to play card games at night, and a container of lotion. I’ve decided that the only things that should rotate from this basket are books. Nothing else needs to get added into this space.
I can’t tell you how much better it feels to have this space organized. When the last thing you see before you go to sleep and the first thing you see when you wake up in the morning is a cluttered mess, you feel like a cluttered mess yourself. Just keeping my nightstand organized and clutter-free has encouraged me to be more consistent with making my bed each morning. This in turn spills out into other areas of my home.
If your nightstand is a disorganized mess, what are you waiting for?! Go take 10-15 minutes and get it back on track right now! You will be so happy you did.