You Can Un-Clutter Your Home One Commercial at a Time

Most of my house has been cluttered for years. I do have times when I resolve that things are going to be different around here. I am going to un-clutter this house if it kills me. I'm sure you have made the same resolve-more than once.

Every once in a while, someone comes up with a "new" idea about getting organized, and I take another stab at it. Here are a few of the "new" ideas I have tried.

1. Choose one day of the week to work on un-cluttering the house.

That sounds reasonable, and actually does work-for a short period of time. Then, before the next un-cluttering day rolls around, the areas you weren't able to do the week before are encroaching on the un-cluttered area and you can no longer tell the difference between the two.

There are a couple of possible solutions for this problem.

First, you can involve the whole family in the project. If you all choose the same day of the week for your un-cluttering day, you would hopefully have the whole house cleaned up by the end of the day. Result; no clutter left to spill over into other areas.

Another solution, especially if you are working alone, is to tape a "no admittance" sign to each newly uncluttered room to be removed only when the whole house is done.

2. Un-clutter your house one shelf or one drawer at a time.

This method takes much longer and is subject to the same problems as choosing one day of the week as un-cluttering day. However, this method is better than doing nothing at all.

3. Get rid of clutter by establishing a once a month "Donation Day."

If you have small children, try to make your donation day fall on a day when you can drop them off at play school, or for a play date with a friend. Otherwise, every time you choose something to put in the donation bag, you will have to deal with prying it out of the hands of a broken-hearted child who will declare it is his very favorite toy, or book, or pencil.

When you are ready, take several large garbage bags-the kind that tie at the top to hide what is in them after they are full. Enter each room ready to do business, and fill those bags. Do two tiny little girls really need 172 books, and 327 stuffed animals? How about 24 puzzles, 31 board games, 10 pairs of outgrown shoes, and enough pens, pencils, and crayons to outfit an entire school in Nairobi? Be ruthless. Most kids won't even miss most of this stuff, and, if they do, you can convince them how much more a homeless little child at the local mission needs it than they do.

You may need to go back for more bags. Where did all this stuff come from anyway? Maybe it's time to talk well-meaning grandmas and grandpas into sinking a few dollars into college accounts rather than more toys.

Of course there will be some stuff that you need to dispose of that is in too bad of shape to be donated anywhere, but that is all the more reason for you to get rid of it, so save a bag or two for those items.

You'll be amazed at the "clutter less" look of your house after one or two "Donation Days" have passed.

4. Un-clutter your house while talking on the phone.

If you have a friend or relative that corners you several times a week to "visit" on the phone, what a perfect opportunity to de-clutter. You can use the speaker feature of your telephone and de-clutter to your heart's content. If you run out of things to straighten, or organize in one room, move to another, if your phone is portable, or bring a few drawers in from another room and start working on them.

When the phone call ends, your caller will have to rush around catching up on all the things they neglected while you visited, but you will have a big smile on your face instead.

5. Finally, turn de-cluttering into a game.

This is something new that I just read about the other day, but, if you enjoy watching a lot of TV, it could work very well for you.

The lady who wrote the article said that she jumps up from her easy chair every time a commercial comes on TV and rushes off to do a little more de-cluttering. She was hoping to have her house ready for visitors by the middle of July and had chosen this method to do it.

When she hears her program come back on, she dashes back to her chair until the next commercial. So far, she says that she has finished 2 spare bedrooms and the kitchen. More power to her, I say.

Well, I hope you found one or more ideas here that can help you a bit with what seems to have become the great American Pastime-the endless de-cluttering of our homes. I could have mentioned a sixth idea-the avoidance of the need to de-clutter by refusing to buy things we don't need in the first place, but I'll leave that for another article and another day.