“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”—William Morris
Clutter is like obscenity: hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.”
There are endless tricks and methods for neatly corralling your belongings, but deciding what constitutes clutter is generally a matter of personal taste. Take this quick quiz from Parents.com to determine your clutter tolerance (apparently I’m a Clutterholic) then check out these tips and resources for honing in on some common clutter categories.
Trash
All trash is clutter, but not all clutter is trash. Zoom around your home with a grocery sack and pitch all the empty envelopes, fabric softener sheets, and stale Cheerios you find on the floor.
Empty all trashcans at least daily; your home will certainly smell better, and your toss-out efforts won’t be thwarted by an overfull trashcan that can’t hold one more Kleenex.
Homeless Items
“A place for everything, and everything in its place.” How many times have you heard that old organizing chestnut? It’s a pithy answer to a common problem: too much stuff, too little space.
From “Everything in Its Place Saves Time”, presented by FineLiving.com: Keep the thinking simple. House items in the location that they are most often used. Everyday items should be housed within easy reach of all family members and should be easy to put away and retrieve. If items are not used often—say, vases—then they can be housed in a less accessible location, such as a top shelf in the garage or laundry room. Items that are used in many areas of the house—say, scissors—can be housed in those numerous locations.
Also, be sure that you’re housing location—for instance, for mail—is in the path that an individual would take naturally coming into the house. If you set the expectations that mail will be housed immediately upstairs, you are only setting yourself up for disappointment. Work with the flow. Do not try to change where your spouse will drop his/her receipts at the end of the day. You know where the purse or pocket gets emptied, so create the location there for receipts.
