Your car serves as an extension of your house or workplace since you spend a lot of time in it. Whether you are driving the kids to school, going to work, or travelling, you carry your stuff with you in your car and so do your kids.
With all these items coming into the car if they aren’t properly organised they could create a mess. And even worse, they may act as distractions while driving or a lethal projectile if there is an accident. Also, if you couldn’t find what you were looking for amid the clutter, you can wind up spending more money on buying things you already have in the car.
So how do you organise your car to keep it clean, prevent accidents, save up some money, and create the maximum space you and your kids need to enjoy every ride home?
5 Tips for Maximising Car Space and Keeping Items Organised
Here are some inexpensive and easy to practice car organisation ideas:
1. Declutter
Decluttering your space is the first step to organising. Clean out your car by taking everything out of it. Get rid of the rubbish and take out everything that would be better kept in your house or simply carried to the vehicle if needed.
2. Organise Your Car’s Interior
Keep essential items within reach and be safety conscious when organising the inside of your car.
- Keep only important items inside the glove compartment.
- Add a rubbish can with a lid to collect rubbish.
- Use organisers for the front and back seats to keep things neatly arranged.
- Use a good visor organiser for sunglasses, chargers, and other small items.
3. Organise Your Boot
A car’s boot is often filled with miscellaneous items. So if you’re not careful, you could wind up stuffing it with rubbish.
- Declutter your boot to make room for when you need to transport items.
- Keep in your boot the things you need when you’re outside the car.
- Get a boot organiser to keep items from rolling around and causing damage.
4. Get a Basket to Hold Your Kids’ Essentials
As a busy mother you can reduce your stress by collecting your kid’s essentials in a basket or caddy. This will help you stay organised without having to search through your car all the time looking for an item.
5. Declutter Regularly
Make cleaning out your car a habit. Perform regular decluttering exercises, especially after business trips or family vacations when you’re likely to amass additional stuff and rubbish.
Using Car Organisers
Sometimes you don’t have enough storage for your phone charger, notepad, or sunglasses. Using a few well-designed car organisation or requesting the services of professional organisers can be helpful in this situation.
Here are some car organisers you can use to maximise the available space in your car: car backseat organiser, phone holder, drinking cup holder, boot organiser, side pockets, rubbish can, envelopes, and visor organisers.
Designating Car Storage Solutions
Everything that is loose in the car will become a projectile in an accident. Small objects like sunglasses are also risky since they can move more quickly and fit in smaller spaces, making them just as dangerous as bulkier items like umbrellas and strollers. Packing and organising these objects in car storage solutions will keep the car secure and tidy.
Maintaining Cleanliness
Weekly car cleaning helps to maintain an orderly and neat space. Just as with the rooms in your house, your car won’t become a big mess if you set aside fifteen minutes each week to clean it.
Learn more about car organisation in this podcast:
96.5-Luke-Suzie-Car Organisation
Transcript
Luke: Faith Family Culture with Luke and Susie, and you can stay in touch on the SMS 8417-455-537. Susie, I think one of the things that is the greatest experience in your life is when you eventually get round to cleaning out a car and keeping it, getting it all spiffy and in order that you make a lot of money doing that. Because we actually be really bad, most of us, with kids, at keeping that car organised, so we find coins and money and old food. How do you keep a car altogether when you’ve got little kids from a Little Miss Organised? Bonnie hello. The cars are like a wrecking yard at times.
Bonnie: Look, the car is like a hidden playground for all the dirty secrets you never want to reveal.
Luke: So, a Little Miss Organised. How do you keep your car organised and clean and on top of it?
Bonnie: Look, I think it’s just a matter of not having too much stuff in there in the first place and just being fastidious, really, about emptying it when you get home and yeah, filling it back up with the stuff that you need. So I really encourage people to only keep in there what they absolutely need.
So, for me, who’s got young children, I’ve got my pram in there, we’ve got a picnic blanket and a hat for me, and an umbrella, but nothing else that stays in the car or in the boot and takes up space, because those are the things that wherever we are, they’re useful and I like having them there.
But for a lot of people, they have just so much stuff in there, and these cars really become this mobile dumping ground for all their shoes and their clothes and their wet togs and things like that. So the problem becomes an issue with having too much stuff in the car when we just are not emptying it.
Susie: So the simple solution is, every time you get home, take out anything that you put in that trip.
Bonnie: Yeah, exactly. Because let’s face it, the stuff didn’t walk into the car by itself. Someone’s put it in there. So, someone needs to take responsibility for getting it out of there. And if that’s your child’s put it in there and you have to take it out, then so be it. It’s about stepping up to the plate, really, and actually just emptying it out and making sure that you’re not taking too much stuff in there in the first place.
Luke: You say that they didn’t walk in there, but if you’ve seen some of the stuff in my car, it has legs and some of it has wings as well, so anything’s possible.
Susie: I do remember seeing one time, Bonnie, that someone said that anything that is loose in your car, anything that is not a part of the car in case of an accident, becomes a projectile. And so that’s why it’s important that you take stuff out of your car every time. And don’t just leave stuff in there, because if it happens that you have an accident, those things can actually end up doing more damage to the kids in the car.
Bonnie: That’s exactly right. And I think a lot of people forget that, and they have a lot of heavy stuff floating around, and even just a kid’s shoe on the bottom of the car, those things are lethal.
Susie: Yeah.
Luke: Especially the smell.
Susie: Yeah, exactly. But even things like water bottles, if they’re sitting in the car heat for too long, they stop being good, like they’re not safe.
Bonnie: That’s exactly right. The plastic starts to break down, and nobody should be drinking that, so yeah, it’s interesting how many people do keep a lot of stuff in their car because they don’t have time when they get home to empty it out. But it really does become a breeding ground for germs, and it’s also not modelling to our kids the sort of behaviour that we want them to take into their room. So how can we expect our kids to keep their rooms nice and tidy and organised if we are showing them in the rest of the house and in our car that we don’t mind having dirt around or we don’t mind it being cluttered and disorganised?
Susie: Boom. Bringing it home, Little Miss Organised.
Luke: I’ve got an answer to that question she just asked because we take all the stuff from their bedroom and store it in the car.
Susie: It is simple solutions to problems that really don’t need to be there. Little Miss Organised Bonnie, thank you so much for bringing some common sense to Car organisation today.
Bonnie: No problem, guys. Talk next time. Bye.
Conclusion
After successfully arranging your boot and interiors, be sure to put everything back where it belongs. Throw away any rubbish, and transport everything that accumulated in your car back to your home. Make it a practice to regularly clean out your car. Perform frequent decluttering routines, especially after family or business trips when you collect extra stuff.
While car cleaning may not sound like the most enjoyable task, once you start, the maintenance will get a lot easier. Keeping your car organised can help keep it safe and spotless for a long time and save you time, money, and effort.
