Spring Cleaning: How to Get Rid of Clutter

By Sue Shellenbarger WSJ

I have never been much of a housecleaner, but this winter the clutter in my house got to be too much for me.

After a couple of busy years, I had let my garage, in particular, get out of control. Wall-to-wall boxes and bags of stuff made simply opening the door a stressful experience. Parking my car in there was beyond imagining.

Many people are battling clutter, as I report in Wednesday’s Work & Familycolumn on spring-cleaning methods. Weekly hours spent on housework since 1976 have fallen 20% among married couples, according to a studyat the University of Michigan. And clutter around the house is a source of tension for four out of five of couples, says a recent survey  of 1,019 adults for Kijiji.com.

People hang onto stuff because it has sentimental meaning, or shields them from anxieties about not having enough, experts say. In my case, I become attached to the hopes and memories I associate with my stuff. Old, unused board games are more than board games in my mind; they represent my love of quiet family evenings together. To me, our art-supply cabinet crammed with old stickers, glitter and paper signifies how much I enjoyed equipping my children, when they were small, to plunge into arts-and-crafts projects on a whim.

Once you realize the stuff is just stuff – not memories and relationships – it becomes easier to discard or donate unneeded items. In “Unclutter Your Life in One Week,”  author Erin Rooney Doland recommends taking digital photos of sentimental items, then giving them away. If you inherit Grandmother’s china but don’t want to use it, she suggests keeping a teacup as a memento and donating the rest. And “if your dresser is filled with T-shirts from college, cut them up and make them into a quilt,” she writes. Other people automatically toss stuff if they haven’t used it for six months or a year. Still others imagine that they are moving; the thought of boxing, loading, unloading and unboxing hundreds of pounds of stuff is enough to turn them into avid de-junkers.

Organizing expert Julie Morgenstern suggests writing “treasure guidelines,” or criteria for keeping stuff, and taping them to the wall of your work area. Ask yourself, “If this were gone tomorrow, would I miss it?” she says. For example, you might not miss the books that have been standing on your shelves for years; but even though you only wear a black cocktail dress once every five years – you might still miss it, she says....

Readers, is clutter a problem at your house? Does it cause tension in your family or marriage? What techniques or de-junking criteria do you use to keep it from getting out of control? Do you find it hard to detach from certain items you really don’t need any more?

read full article HERE

contact Affordable Christian House Cleaning at 817-710-4174