Five minutes can transform the way you live in your home. (Cheryll Gillespie)

Five minutes a day can help you make the most of your home. Often, the home or the rooms of your dreams seem unobtainable. Just the thought of all that decorating and designing is overwhelming. But what if you could make it happen in five minutes or less, would you be up for it?

Absolutely, and five minutes can transform the way you live in your home. It is truly amazing how much can be accomplished in such a short time frame. The five-minutes-a-day approach offers even the busiest person the opportunity for beautiful rooms, fully decorated and organized. So where do you start?

Start by committing to five minutes on your to-do-list. I am a to-do-list person - in fact I can’t even fathom functioning without my list. I take it every where with me and am constantly adding to the list. If it’s not on paper it will most likely not get done in my world. So, schedule five minutes for your home and identify one issue you want to address: This could be adding a vase of fresh flowers to the night stand (3 minutes to go outside and cut a few flowers or branches of a flowering bush and 2 minutes to arrange and place the vase); or organizing the junk drawer; cleaning out the freezer or even re-organizing the hall closet. In fact, if you are a to-do list junkie as I am you may even start a five minute list and just start scratching them off as you go.

What else can get done in five minutes? Lots! That’s about the time it takes to rearrange the living room so that the furniture focuses on the room’s focal point (the fireplace or a window with a great view) and then move all the furniture to sit with in a perfect 13to 15 foot square.

Tomorrow rearrange a table top or the top of the fireplace mantel. Perhaps you stumbled across a fabulous mirror (when you accidentally wondered into a discount home fashion store on your way to the grocery store!). On a side note, a girl committed to the five-minutes-a-day plan is always on the look-out for fabulous treasures that she can bring home; whether they be table top accessories or black and white frames for the photo wall - I found the most amazing pottery vases at the farmers’ market last weekend. You may stumble across a sisal area carpet, perfect for summer, while you were shopping for the kids’ beachwear(no need to mention that the rug sale didn’t happen in the kids’ department!). I can even hang blinds in under five minutes. When we put our mind to it, a lot can be accomplished in three hundred seconds.

At the grocery store, stock up on plastic containers to use when you organize the freezer (I love opening my freezer and seeing perfect organization: stacked containers of berries, nuts and other frozen delights).

Use medium-sized Ziploc bags to store all your bathing suits in. One suit per bag and they are always ready to travel, and on the way home from the beach, you have a bag to carry the wet suit in. Organizing your swi suits into individual Ziploc bags is yet another five-minute job that makes life more livable.

The five minutes list is virtually endless: rearranging a shelf to look brilliant – remembering to arrange horizontal surfaces in the shape of a triangle, with a tall, medium and low item. For example, a tall vase or lamp, a medium-sized picture frame and a bowl of potpourri or small candle.

If we breakup our decorating ambitions into five minute jobs, nothing seems overwhelming – it’s all do-able. And it’s amazing, to look back after only a few weeks and admire the transformation. Trust me, a girl can get a lot accomplished in five minutes.