Last week I talked about portable tool organizers, a topic that’s dear to my heart now that I’ve begun my springtime cleanup. Having a mess of screws, glues, tape and tools tangled together inside my front-hall closet was causing me to curse. Now that I’ve got that under control, it’s time to tackle the rest of the house.

If you’ve ever worked in a professional kitchen, or even watched shows on The Food Network, you know the French term “mise en place,” which means, loosely, “put in place” or “prepared and ready to use.” The term is equally applicable to every room in the house, but especially shared areas. Is there anything more annoying than looking for something—scissors, bike tire pump, the remote—and discovering it’s nowhere to be found?

Luckily, the web is full of home organizing tips, although like exercise and dieting sites, most offer “the easy way” rather than giving effective, realistic tips. There are some gems though:

Organized Home is like an online magazine dedicated exclusively to getting your home in order. While it may drift into women’s magazine clichés (“Many hands make light work! Reward the team with dinner at a pizza parlor!”), it does contain some great ideas for cutting clutter and getting kids motivated to help clean.

Organization can become a personal religion for some—that’s why some of us dust and vacuum when we’re feeling anxious—and it follows that those who are passionate about keeping clean become tidying evangelists. Blogger Tracy runs a site dedicated to her passion: tips and techniques for an efficient, well-organized house. Tips to Organize Life includes room-by-room plans for keeping clutter at bay, and runs the gamut from a step-by-step checklist for the bathroom to creating a schedule for your home office.

OnlineOrganizing.com has a very cool tool in its clickable house; click on a room and up pops a list of organization tips and ideas. The site also features a clickable office, 15-minute quick fixes and checklists used by professional organizers.

Most often, the obstacle to getting organized is knowing when to let go of useless clutter and collections and how to keep regular, everyday items in their mise en place. General rule: if it’s something you use regularly, keep it in an easily accessible spot; if it’s something you use infrequently, put it away and take note of where it’s hidden so the next time you need that tire pump ASAP, you won’t need to tear apart the garage to find it. Now if I could only find where I put that note …