Are your nightstands more Dr. Dolittle or Dr. Strangelove? Your bedside manner could be affecting the way you relax. It’s hard to relieve the stress of the day by looking at a cluttered and overflowing nightstand. Watch this video to make relaxation time less stressful and more productive. That is just what the doctor ordered!
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdnight.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we are going to talk about your nightstand. Your bedroom is supposed to be restful and relaxing, and sometimes the nightstand area is so cluttered it feels anything but. So, we’re going to tackle this area first by looking at the functions that are going on in this space. A lot of people jump into something, and they just try to clean it up, but they haven’t thought through what all needs to be accommodated here. So one of the primary functions that we see in almost every home is reading on the nightstand. And we see books and magazines, of course. One of the problems is that people haven’t really gotten real about what they’re actually going to be reading. So they have a stack of 10 books and, you know, 15 magazines and catalogs, and they need to keep that pared down. So only the most recent catalogs and magazines and just two or three books that you’re working on will make this area feel a lot better immediately.
You might also want some accessories for your reading nearby, like highlighters and sticky notes and a blade to cut out things from magazines. So, make sure all of those things are together and rounded up for you. You may also have another function here of television watching. That’s very common. So you may have remote controls. We actually have a whole video about organizing your remote controls that you might want to watch. And I have this very dorky accessory I thought it would be fun to share with you. I use these to watch TV. These are on my nightstand. They’re called bed spectacles. And they are ridiculously bad looking but they are prism mirrors inside. You can put them on – aren’t they gorgeous – and when you are laying flat, completely prone, you can have these on and you can still see what’s in front of you. So I can see perfectly the television or a book that I have on my lap. And it is very comfortable. I don’t have to prop myself up with so many pillows. So this is a pretty handy thing I have on my nightstand, even though it is dorkalicious.
So, you may have grooming items, like a nail file or lip balm. You may have even things for sleeping, like a sleeping mask or earplugs. And you may do journaling or puzzles. Think through all the functions that are going on in this space for you, and make sure all of those have something for their storage to be accommodated.
Now, one of the problems in this area is that nightstand furniture in general often doesn’t have very good storage built into it. This one has two drawers, which is great, but we often will see that there is a table with nothing underneath it, no shelves, no drawers. You can either switch that out for a piece of furniture that does have storage in it, or you can cover a table with a tablecloth and then use a basket to hide things underneath and pull that in and out, or you can use something called bed pockets, which you can see here on the screen. You can sew these yourself really easily. You can find patterns on-line, they’re all over the place, or you can just buy them outright by searching for bed pockets, but they tuck in between the mattress and box spring and you can store all kinds of goofy things like these glasses in there and have them handy.
Another problem we see in this area is trash. So often, people are generating trash frequently here, but they don’t have a trash can. So, maybe they’ve got a lot of wrappers from medications, or they’ve got a lot of tissues that they use, and they are just leaving them out on the flat surface, and that really doesn’t feel very good when you walk in and see that. So, get yourself a little trash can if you need one, and you can solve that problem. So think through it, go through it, and make it a place that you want to spend time and relax.
If you’d like to go through your whole house and go to projects like this on a weekly basis, and get all the help that you need from our expert team to do it. We have these weekly plans every week that come out for our members. You can find out more about this at clutterdiet.com/learnmore.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to keep a clean bedside table or tips for organizing a bedroom.
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