A home with a place for everything and everything in its place can save time, stress and money - and boost your home's appeal should you decide to sell it. What follows is a game plan to help you get, and keep, your home organized.

        The prospect of organizing your home can be daunting. To make the task more manageable and increase your odds of success, break it down - focus on one space at a time. That space may be as small as a desk or as big as an entire room. Whatever area you choose, stick with it until it's done.

        Before you can actually get to organizing, you need to purge your chosen space of items that don't belong there. If you don't love it, need it or haven't used it for a year, throw it out or give it away; chances are it won't be missed. Keep a box handy for items that should be kept but make more sense in a different space; later, you can distribute the contents to areas where the items rightfully belong, so that they can be incorporated into your organizational scheme for that space.

        After purging, you'll no doubt find yourself with extra room that you weren't even aware you had. Now it's time to organize, which means using the space to designate a spot for each of the items that belong there, a spot where they will always be stored when not in use. As you find a home for your things, group similar items together for convenience and place frequently used items where they can be quickly and easily accessed.

        If you find that you still don't have enough room to store everything that belongs in the space you're working on, you can always purchase some creative storage solutions. Depending on the area you're organizing, the remedy might be more shelving to take advantage of vertical space, under-bed totes to maximize space that typically goes unused or decorative storage boxes that can be seamlessly incorporated into your decor.

        Now that all of your things have a permanent home, the trick to keeping organized is making sure they stay there. Ideally, get into the habit of replacing items immediately after you've finished with them. This may be challenging at first, but after a while it should become routine. If that strategy doesn't work for you, use time that likely gets wasted while waiting for the oven to heat up or talking on the phone, for example, to pick things up and return them to their home. Or dedicate 10 minutes before bed each night to round up out-of-place items and put them away. Once picking up and putting away becomes a second nature, maintaining an organized home is easy!