Lipp - Clutter Free: Quick and Easy Steps to Simplifying Your Space

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

EUGENE, OREGON

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CLUTTER FREE

Copyright 2015 by Kathi Lipp

Published by Harvest House Publishers

Eugene, Oregon 97402

www.harvesthousepublishers.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lipp, Kathi

Clutter free / Kathi Lipp.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-7369-5913-1 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-7369-5914-8 (eBook)

1. Storage in the home. 2. Orderliness. 3. House cleaning. I. Title.

TX309.L5545 2015

648'.5dc23

2014032371

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For Dad

Great thanks go to Erin MacPherson, who kept me together. Duct tape and chewing gum, baby.

Thanks, Cheri Gregory, for sharing your stories and baring your soul when it comes to clutter.

Thanks to Amanda, Jeremy, Justen, and Kimber. Youve lived this. And yet you still love me. Amazing.

Susy Flory, Renee Swope, Michele Cushatt, and Crystal Paine. God bless each of you. So thankful. So, so thankful.

So much thanks goes to my team: Kim Nowlin, Angela Bouma, Wendy Doyle, and Julie Johnson. I cant even. Love each of you godly, talented women.

Thanks go to Rod Morris, the most patient man alive, and to Rachelle Gardner, agent of the century.

To our families: the Richersons, the Lipps, and the Dobsons. Thanks for giving us the best stories.

And finally to Roger. This has been the hardest year of our lives together, and yet every day you still get up, make the bed, and remind me that youd do it all over again.

Contents

C heri Gregory is one of my best friends.

We are both authors and speakers. Beyond that, we have almost nothing in common.

She is working toward her doctorate in leadership. My parents wanted to throw a big party for me when I graduated from high school (I think they knew early on that was the only graduation they were ever going to see out of me).

Cheri could be happy writing all day long. I love writing. But only when I have a brilliant idea and the words to express it with (so about every three months).

Cheri doesnt watch TV. I dont understand that concept. Some of my best friends are reality stars. We havent met, but I can tell you deep and personal stories about most of the winners of Top Chef and So You Think You Can Dance

Cheri loves research. Enough said.

But the one other thing Cheri and I have in common, are sisters-from-another-mister soul mates on, is our constant battle over clutter. As weve worked together on books and speaking projects, blog posts and consulting, somehow our conversation always, always circles back to clutter.

While Cheri tends toward being a historian of clutter (she wants to keep everything that her children have ever doodled on), I am more of an overall curator of stuff. I labor under the illusion that if I just had the right pair of cream wedge sandals, all my outfits would suddenly look amazing, the right color Post-it note will help me finally become organized, and the right eye cream will change my life.

But weve both discovered that we do better with less stuff.

The good news? We are so much better off than even five years ago.

The other news? It is still something we work on every single day.

So whenever we make a new step in our personal clutter-free journey, any time there is an aha!, we share it with each other. We discuss it and dissect it and figure out how to not let a poor decision happen again (or at least not as often). And in the past several years, as our understanding of the root causes of clutter increases, the piles decrease.

As weve discussed the clutter, talked about the reasons and feelings buried underneath all that stuff, we have come to some surprising (to us) understandings of why we have allowed all these things into our lives, and more importantly, how to deal with all that clutter so it no longer rules our lives.

Our findings have fallen into three areas:

1. The Why of Clutter So often, we buy in order to become, and this state of our heart has led to collecting clutter.

2. The What of Clutter Our so-called logical thinking gets in the way of us getting rid of all the stuff weve collected over the years.

3. The How of Clutter This is where we get to the nitty-gritty of what to do about all the clutter.

Now if youre anything like me, your temptation will be to skip to the how part. Just tell me what to do with all this stuff! you cry.

I get it. Youre desperate.

But unless you deal with the heart and head issues behind your clutter, you will not be prepared to make the hard decisions to get yourself out of the mountain of things weighing you down.

And heres the secret no one ever told meonce you deal with the why, once you get to the core of why you buy and keep things you do not love and do not need, the how part becomes much easier.

Once you get the why figured out, getting rid of clutter will not only become easy, it will become joyful. Im not kidding. When you start to see things leave your house, you will feel lighter and will want that feeling to go on and on. You will develop a disdain for anything that is not loved or needed. You will walk through a store and not want anything on the shelves because, really, you are satisfied. Yes, you may go shopping to purchase a new pair of sandals because yours are worn out, but you wont buy them in every color, and you wont come home with a shirt and skirt to matchbecause you are satisfied.

This is where I live now.

Yes, I still have my clutter battles, but theyve been downgraded from clutter wars. And I want you to join me on the less cluttered side of life.

I am here to tell you my stories, along with a few from Cheri and other friends, and to play the good cop/bad cop of your clutter crimes.

Cheri tells me that Im the cheerleader who says, You can do it! and Look at how awesome your life could be if you did this one simple thing! and shes the one who says, Heres what you need to stop doing, and Heres a truth thats going to hurt, but youll be better for it.