Vanessa Riley - 3-Day Plan for Clutter-Free Living: Simple Steps to Organize Your Home and Life

3-Day Plan for Clutter-Free Living

Simple Steps to Organize your Home and Life

Copyright Notice

Reproduction, duplication, transmission of this document in part or in whole is permitted only with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

Respective brands and trademarks mentioned in this book belong to their respective owners.

Disclaimer

This document is geared towards providing summarization of information related to the topic. While all attempts have been made to verify the accuracy of the information, the author does not assume any responsibility for errors, omissions, or interpretations of the content. The information is offered for informational or entertainment purposes only. If professional advice is necessary, a qualified legal, medical, financial or another respective professional should be consulted. The reader is responsible for his or her own actions. The publisher does not accept any responsibility or liability arising from damages or losses, real or perceived, direct or indirect, resulting from the use of this information.

I n our consumer societies, we are spoiled by an abundance of tempting things to buy, to own, to have and brag about and to take care of. We acquire for the sake of acquisition. We buy things because it was a good deal. We buy things because of peer pressure (and dont tell me you have not caved into your children when they tell you, But mom EVERYONE has one!).

After a while, these delightful, ingenious and craved possessions just seem to pile up. We shove them in the back of a drawer. We toss them on the floor of a closet. They create a lot of clutter. We hope it will all go away, but like that old adage, "We can't see the forest for the trees." Our house and all our living spaces get cluttered to a point we cannot find anything, see anything we own, or (and this is the worst) even remember that we have it.

Clutter! Sometimes it makes you pull your hair out. It has overwhelmed you to the point that you don't know how to start or where to start to get your house and living spaces back to order, organization and functionality. You would just be happy if you could walk through the rooms of your house with plenty of space without crushing anything underfoot!

The reason most people have cluttered and disorganized living spaces is threefold. They don't throw things away; they don't put things away; they just have too much stuff for the living space.

Often we look around and see a hammer and pliers under some old newspapers and what do we say? How in the world did that get there? That is the song that clutter sings!

Maybe this is you! If you are determined to do so, you can declutter and organize your home in a 3-day weekend. We'll show you how in these pages.

All you need to do is stay focused, follow our plan, and be determined that you will follow the 2 rules of Home Organization and Decluttering .

The #1 Rule:

If your clutter is truly trash you will throw it in the trashcan. Your home is not the trashcan!

The #2 Rule:

Everything you own has a logical place to be stored and is stored there. A place for everything and everything in its place.

To stay focused, you cannot get distracted by the emotions of some of the things that you will discover along the way. Things like memories remembering where you bought something, or who gave it to you as a gift, or all the times you looked for this item and couldn't find it. Things like feelings being nostalgic about the history of the item, and not wanting to get rid of it, even though you haven't used it (or even seen it) for years.

Our plan is simple. And so is yours reserve three full days to decluttering and organizing your living spaces and your possessions a little differently.

We know your motivations. We also know your excuses! It's time to prevent new visitors to your home from associating the clutter in your house with the clutter in your head. Oh, yes! People spending any time in your home associate the clutter and messiness of your living spaces with clutter, messiness and confusion in your thinking. My guess is that, if you were looking for a new job and the hiring manager knew how cluttered your home was you might not get that new job. He would be afraid of you turning their office workspace into a hurricane zone, too!

You may argue that it is or isn't true. That's not the point! Why give outsiders a chance to judge you negatively, when all you need to do is declutter and organize your home for them to make a 180 turn in their opinion. Wouldn't you rather that a stranger to your home associate you're very organized, meticulously clean home with your way of doing everything in the world?

Lets have a look together at how to declutter and organize your home to suit the functionality of each of your spaces.

W hat you will learn in this chapter:

• Function of your spaces has it gotten lost in the mess?
• Know what you have by doing a quick inventory
• How to return a space to a useful function
• Deciding on storage containers and organization systems

O ne good way to get organized is to look at function. All your possessions have a function, and sometimes just one owner those hockey skates belong to Jeff, and only Jeff. You can also identify the function of a space or a room that bedroom is Jeffs, and only Jeffs.

Bedroom Example:

If your home or apartment has rooms that are specifically called bedrooms, it would be good for that room to be a peaceful space, right?

But if that bedroom is so cluttered, that getting up in the middle of the night to make your way to the bathroom is like running an obstacle course, you know you need to declutter. If that room is used to watch television or play games, you know you need to re-assign that function elsewhere.

Kitchen Example:

If your home or apartment has a room that is specifically called a kitchen, it would be good for that room to have counter space for food preparation, and for everything in the cupboards and on the fridge to be dedicated to cooking and eating tasks, right?

But if that kitchen is so cluttered with first-aid items, school books, expired food items and trash that is not removed regularly, sports gear that needs washing you know you need to declutter this kitchen space.

Walk-Ways Example:

If the entryway to your home or apartment has some wall hooks for seasonal jackets and other outerwear, it would be good that the items hung from those hooks be of the current season, right? If it is full summer, and you still have winter jackets and wool hats in the entryway, it's time to declutter this space!

T his is your inventory task.

On a notepad, go from room to room, and space to space and describe for yourself the actual function of each room or space for you and your family. Your task is to return the room or the space to its original function but you need to know what it is before you can do so.

As you do this exercise, you may discover:

• that your kitchen has become a study room for the kids
• that the entryway has become a dumping ground for every pair of shoes in the house
• a hidden mountain of dirty clothes on the floor of a bedroom closet

Make a list now of the original or preferred function of each space, and then what appears to be its current function or functions. Perhaps each space will end up described something like this: