Remove Clutter Before It Ever Appears
1- Cultivate the desire to live a simple life
It is very easy to jump right into the heart of the matter, start rolling up your sleeves and look for the nearest pile of clutter while missing the bigger point. While it is absolutely necessary to address the piles and boxes of clutter that crowd your home, simply viewing it this way would miss what should truly be done.
The best and most effective way to remove clutter before it even begins is to adopt the mentality that a life of minimal and simple possessions is one that fosters happiness and contentment. Finding satisfaction is not about playing a “king of the hill” with your material wealth, but in finding ways to maintain what you need, and then let the relationships in your life add spice and variety to your world.
2- Remove clutter in small ways, in small places
One of the fastest ways that papers, folders, envelopes, brochures and paraphernalia accumulate is when they just get brought home without much more thought as to their destination. Handle this problem by being highly intentional about even the smallest items that are brought back into your home, and ultimately what is to be done with them.
As soon as you get home, do not go off to take care of another project or a different desire. Start developing the discipline today to use five minutes for immediate organization of small items and assorted papers. This will create a molehill out of what would otherwise slowly become a mountain of papers, crowding all sorts of space.
3- If non-essential items are sitting too long, re-designate or throw away
Occasionally you will come home from a vacation or a weekend of festivities and discover that something placed on your table or kitchen counter on Monday has remained there for a whole week. Seeing items sitting for too long means that they have no purpose, have not been given a specific place in the house or are truly pieces of clutter.
Take a few minutes to figure out where the item is supposed to go, or decide whether or not it can be donated, freecycled or tossed out. The sooner items find their ultimate place and purpose, the better you will feel and the cleaner your home will be.
4- Find a new home for what you do not regularly use
There will be plenty of instances in which you are performing fall or spring cleaning and you come across an outfit that you have not worn in two years, or you dig up an old appliance that was sitting in the basement, having never truly been plugged in and utilized. If you cannot quickly come up with where it was supposed to go, or how and when it was actually meant to be used, consider listing it on Craigslist, eBay, or at a garage sale. The old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” cannot be more aptly stated in such a circumstance.
When done well, getting rid of clutter for good can become a job skill in and of itself. Having to remove so much stuff quickly becomes exhausting, leaving you depressed when you are reminded that clutter is still usually half the battle of cleaning a home. If clutter has gotten you worn out, and you want to hand off the other cleaning tasks to a team, consider Real Deal Cleaning Services. Our work is provided by insured, bonded and licensed professionals. Look into a free in-home estimate today.
On this post you will learn How to De-clutter and Do Good.
