Decluttering Your Home and Your Life

There are so many excuses about why we don’t need to get rid of our clutter:

• I might need this some day;
• It has sentimental value;
• I have so much, I don’t know where to begin;
• I don’t have the time, money or energy to do this;
• I don’t have any help;
• I paid good money for that…

They all seem like valid excuses, but the fact of the matter is your clutter is keeping you from moving forward in your life.  You do have a choice though — You can remove the clutter from your life or remove the possibility of ever achieving your dreams.  You’ve got to get rid of the old to make room for the new.  This process involves a lot of faith and trust.

Cheryl Richardson, personal coach and author of “Standing Up for Your Life” says:

Last month I decided it was time to declutter my home office.  I felt the energy was getting stagnant and I was resistant to going in my office to work every day, so I knew I needed to take action.  It actually took me 3 days to clean out all the clutter because so much of it was “paper clutter” and I had to go through it one by one, but I got it done and now I love going into my clean and organized office each and every day.

Here are the before and after photos:

BEFORE PHOTOS

AFTER PHOTOS

So what exactly is clutter?  According to Karen Kingston, author of “Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui”, there are 4 categories:

1.      Things you do not use or love;

2.      Things that are untidy or disorganized;

3.      Too many things in too small of a space;

4.      Anything unfinished.

To get started, you must systematically go through each and every room in your home and begin to get rid of things you do not use or love.  The best way to do this is to get boxes or containers and label them:

• Donations;
• Recycle;
• Consignment Shop;
• Trash;

At least that’s how I do it.  I have an account at the local consignment shop and when I’m cleaning out rooms, I pack up a box to bring over to them so I can feel good about getting some money back for my things and I also feel good about someone else enjoying my unused stuff.

Clearing up your clutter isn’t just about removing things from your house.  It is also about organizing the stuff you are keeping.  If you’ll notice in the “after” photos, on the one side of my office where the folding table had been with lots of clutter on top of it, I replaced it with a nice shelf (bakers rack) with wicker baskets that I organized things into categories such as:  electronics, photos, office supplies, etc.  I also added 2 chairs and a table and now I constantly get visitors in my office, like my children and my cats!

It takes time, money and energy to organize our stuff, but once it’s done, your life will work better because you’ll spend less time looking for things that are lost in piles of stuff.

Now part of your problem might be that you don’t have enough space in your home for the amount of stuff that you have acquired over the years.  That can be a real problem.  So the solution might be to get a bigger place, store some of your stuff away from your home or simply, get rid of it.  Too many things in a small place creates a lot of stagnant energy.

The bottom line as Karen Kingston says is, “Let Go and Let God…because when you totally trust that all your needs are taken care of, they totally will be.”

Other types of clutter you might need to clear out are:

• Emotional Clutter (baggage from your past)
• Relationship Clutter (people that are not helping you expand but instead are causing you to contract; negative people)
• Excess Physical Weight which is a form of clutter on your body
• Unfinished projects (things left half done)
  
• Energy Zappers (things you do that you really don’t want to do)

I’ll end with a great quote from Peter Walsh, Master Organizer and Decluttering expert:

“Decluttering isn’t just simplifying your life. It’s having a vision, setting new priorities and using those notions to get rid of obstacles.”