Decluttering Emotionally Charged Stuff
My son (who is 16 years old now!) has a dwindling collection of kitties (figurines) that he collected in his boyhood. A couple of weeks ago two of his kitties, a pair of black porcelain cats, mysteriously appeared on my desk. I inquired and he told me that he just really didn’t want them anymore.
Well, I didn’t really want the kitties either, to be honest, but still my heart kind of ached at the idea of getting rid of things that once held meaning for my used-to-be-little boy. The kitties spent the last two weeks on my otherwise uncluttered desk. Read more
7 Steps to Declutter Your Home in 15 Minutes a Day
The key to the daily declutter Tweak is to build a habit of spending a little time each day clearing the clutter OUT of the house, without burning yourself out or punishing yourself with hours of work.
Believe me, if you do this every day you will eventually be free of clutter — faster than you think. Remember, your house did not get cluttered overnight, and it doesn’t need to get cleared out overnight either. Start today and steadily get rid of the clutter in little chunks one day at a time.
It’s easy to declutter — just follow these seven steps:
Dealing with Clothing Clutter
A couple of days ago I mentioned my own personal Mount Washmore* from back in my days of extreme household clutter. Mount Washmore was an 18-inch to two-foot deep pile of dirty laundry that covered our laundry room floor and spilled into our bedroom and the hall.
It’s not that I hadn’t been doing laundry, mind you. A couple of times a week I would wash three or four loads in a panicked laundry marathon. (Sunday nights were popular because it would dawn on me, “What the heck are we all going to wear tomorrow??!”) But since I was doing laundry under pressure, I would go through the huge heap trying to piece together enough outfits to get us all through a couple of days. I couldn’t just wash everything because there was so much dirty laundry. Read more
Are You Churning or Decluttering?
Have you ever decided to organize a cluttered desk, closet or room only to spend hours on the task and end up feeling like you have accomplished nothing? One of the biggest mistakes people like us — clutterers or hoarders — make when trying to get on top of a mess is to “churn” the clutter rather than to truly declutter.
What does the word “churn” mean? In the old days, pioneers churned milk to make butter, vigorously mixing the milk up and down in the butterchurn until the butterfat formed a clump. Unethical stockbrokers are said to be churning stocks when they trade excessively — rearranging money in their clients’ portfolios needlessly — in order to earn higher commissions. When we churn our clutter, we’re attempting to move it around and reorganize it, but the end result is still that we have homes filled with stuff we don’t need, don’t love and don’t use. This clutter is smothering us.
When you add the Declutter Daily tweak to your routine, beware of the urge to simply churn the clutter. There is no way to really achieve a peaceful home without clearing the clutter right out the door. Anything that you don’t use regularly and/or love needs to be recycled, given away or simply thrown out. Before you know it, 15 minutes of decluttering a day is going to give you room to breathe and thrive in your home.
Read all the decluttering posts here.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsyk/Tweak: Declutter Daily
I can still remember the moment clearly when I decided to tackle the clutter once and for all. I was sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom.
The desk was piled high with mountains of paper, empty coffee cups, CDs, assorted junk and garbage and who knows what else. The bedroom in which the desk stood was crowded with cardboard boxes of clothes, plastic totes full of clothes and heaps of clothes. There were shopping bags full of papers. There were narrow paths to get around the room. Of course, the bed was unmade. Read more