DECLUTTERING YOUR LIFE ... HANGERS, BASKETS AND BOXES!

You came back! It's good to see you!

You've taken the first steps to DECLUTTERING YOUR LIFE by taking out the trash, stopping the unnecessary buying and cleaned out your junk drawer. The next three things will help you get a little more organized!

HANGERS:

Hang your clothes backwards.

Don't worry about your dresser right now. Let's just look at your closet. Specifically, the clothes you have hanging up. This was a WOW one for me. I'm not sure where I first read about this one, but I do know it worked. First, I turned all my clothes hangers around backwards. Then as I wore things and hung them back in the closet, I turned the hangers frontwards. After a year (You have to do this for a year because you have to go through every season of clothes.), I looked at what was still backwards and was AMAZED at what I DIDN'T wear. I didn't get rid of all the backwards stuff immediately, but it gave me a pile to slowly go through and in the end, I did donate most of those pieces.

BASKETS:

Are you being buried in paper?

I have three suggestions for this.

1. I have a basket for papers in each of my boy's rooms. All of their projects and papers go in their basket. At the end of the school year, we go through it and put favorite pieces in a binder marked with that year. I have one binder for each year of preschool and then in grade school they have one divider for each year.

2. If junk mail is taking over your life you can use the links provided at ECOCYCLE to get off mailing lists, stop getting credit card solicitations, charities from asking for contributions, and companies offering promo products.

3. Another idea is to pay your bills online and ask for paperless billing.

BOXES:

Get three boxes and label them KEEP, TRASH and DONATE.

As you start to purge the different rooms in your home of unnecessary items you can put the items in these boxes, so you can easily see what is a important and what is not. Then as it says, the trash goes to the dump and the donated items can be given to help others. The keep box will be the things you truly treasure. We'll discuss these items in detail in the future.

You might want to designate an area to collect things in like an extra bedroom (which we will reclaim at a later date) or your basement. This helps to keep the items out of sight and not further clutter up your home.

That's it! By starting these three things, I hope you begin to notice a weight lifting off of your shoulders.

Next time you come back it will be TIME TO DIG IN!