Ideas for Dealing with and Organizing Clutter

Organizing clutter is a huge obstacle to anyone wanting a cleaner, more organized house who doesn’t have the know-how to accomplish it. Real cleaning like dusting and vacuuming takes a back seat,once someone allows their house to get too cluttered. Keeping your counters de-cluttered is important when you own a home, otherwise by the time you have finished tidying up the clutter you are out of time or just too tired to continue cleaning. Sometimes it can be overwhelming, but you need to push forward and control your clutter.
Paper is the main culprit of clutter in the house. There are several ways to organize yourself to avoid these things cluttering up your home,whether it’s the mail, newspapers, papers from work, or your kid’s school work and projects they bring home. Take a moment to sort through the mail right when you get it from the mailbox. Put a garbage can by the door so unwanted mail doesn’t have to come into the house. Put bills which you have to pay in “to do” file immediately. The basket of things that need attention can be put around a phone or computer or near a desk, wherever you most often pay your bills. Other important papers should be filed right away. If left in a pile to be taken care of later, they can easily become additional clutter. You can use this process with the work papers you keep at home. File important papers immediately and place the others in a “to-do” pile. Folks occasionally keep their trash receptacles in a lower cupboard shelf in their kitchen. A smart move would be to sit a receptacle of some sort next to your garbage can where you can accumulate discarded newspapers. Then, you can take both the garbage and recyclable paper out at the same time.
If you’re the parent of a school-aged child, you’re well aware of how many papers each child brings home from school every day. Often times parents have trouble finding a balance between hanging on to their children’s keepsakes and minimizing clutter. Maintain a plastic storage container in a cupboard or closet near the location that you sort through the backpack daily. You can utilize this space for important items that you would like to keep; toss out the remaining school work and advertisements. A larger bin can be placed in a basement, under a bed, or in an attic that you can dump the smaller bin into that will permanently hold those precious bits of history that your child will love to look through one day.
There are a few other things that you should always think about when trying to control other types of clutter. Will you use this item again? Tell yourself the truth. Chances are if you have not used a particular item within the past year, you probably won’t use it again, so dispose of it. If it is still clean and in working order,you might want to consider selling it or giving it to a charity. If you don’t use it often and you don’t know if you should keep it, hide it away for half a year and see what you should do. If you have not used the item within that given frame of time, it’s best to dispose of it. Attics, basements, and other storage space are great to store seasonal items. You might want to buy big storage bins that are stackable, for use as drawers. When I buy something that is on sale because it is not in season or I find a seasonal item that was not put away when the rest were and I can’t get it back into the proper box because everything is piled on top of each other is the most frustrating thing for me. When it comes time to decorate for the season, you can easily find what you want and the items you want to put out first if the drawers are clear. Don’t hold onto items that don’t work, are too expensive to fix, or stained. This pertains to every item, not only to those that are seasonal. Probably you’ll expend unnecessary time and energy attempting to maneuver around what ought to be trash. Learning how to organize clutter is one of the most important lessons in keeping your home, and life, clean.