Jennifer Lifford - Clean & Lean House: Put Your House on a Diet to Cut The Clutter

JENNIFER LIFFORD

founder of Clean & Scentsible

This book is dedicated to my amazing family for all of their love, support and seemingly endless messes that gave me lots of material to work with.

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A number of years ago, I decided that it was time to get serious about organizing our home. We had tons of stuff, but could never seem to find what we needed. I always seemed to be organizing our spaces, but a few weeks later it was right back to the cluttered chaos. And then there were those areas of our home that were just too overwhelming to even begin to start organizing. I was spending so much time and energy trying to find things and was constantly frustrated with all of our junk that seemed to be everywhere. Although the house didnt look too bad on the surface, every drawer, closet and storage space was packed to the brim and completely dysfunctional. I could never really relax in our home because I always had a voice in my head nagging me to get things in order.

I knew that I needed to do something, but I wasnt quite sure where to start. The more I thought about what I needed to do to organize my home, the more I was reminded of the principles that we follow when we go on a typical diet to lose weight. By applying these strategies to organizing our home, I eventually developed The Home Decluttering Diet and was able to finally get our home organized once and for all.

The Home Decluttering Diet is a simple-to-follow organization plan that can be used to declutter and organize your entire home and provide you with the techniques and strategies to keep it that way for good. Its designed to take away those feelings of being overwhelmed and replace them with a solid plan to get started and continue moving forward. Each one of us is unique, and our vision of what our organized home is may be different, but this plan can help you achieve your goals whatever they may be.

Having an organized home is not about creating magazine-perfect rooms or adopting a completely minimalist lifestyle. Its about creating a calmer and more peaceful home where you can spend less time cleaning and doing things around the house and more time with your family doing the things you truly love. A home is meant to be lived in and well-loved, and it will get messy at times, but by eliminating those items that we dont need or use, and developing a solid organization plan for those items that we do love and have a purpose for, we can create a home that is both functional and cozy.

Why I Chose The Home Decluttering Diet

Whenever I have difficulty trying to accomplish things, I try to relate back to something that I have more experience with and understand better. I struggled for years trying to get our home organized and, despite all of the time and energy I was putting into things, I was not really achieving any long-term success. I couldnt quite figure out what I was doing wrong.

After spending some time thinking about this, I started to reflect back on what I had learned in my university days and all of the physiology and sports medicine classes that I had taken. I definitely had many experiences with going on weight-loss diets and knew exactly what led to a successful (or unsuccessful) one. The more I thought about the basic diet principles associated with traditional weight loss, the more I thought about how this could be applied to losing all of the extra weight in our home.

It Takes a Long-Term Commitment

I think that its safe to say that a disorganized house, like putting on weight, generally occurs over a longer period of time. We have kids, get pets, develop new hobbies and accumulate all of our clutter weight gradually over the years until one day it hits us that we are way too overloaded and drowning in all of our stuff. Sometimes we may not even recognize that the weight is creeping on as we become so accustomed to the chaos around us.

Unless you have the time to make getting organized a full-time job, it will likely take some time to go through everything and make your home the way that you would like it to be. And thats okay! When you go on a diet, you dont expect to lose it all in a month. Instead, you make a long-term commitment to gradually lose the weight over time through a series of lifestyle changes. Our homes will take time to lose the weight, too, so let go of the thought that you should be expected to do this all at once. It may not happen overnight, but it will happen!

We Must Cut the Calories

Cutting back on the calories is one of the basic principles when going on a diet. Now imagine that every item that you bring into your home is food that you are feeding your home with. The items that you love and are useful can be thought of as healthy, lower-calorie food that is nourishing your home, while the items that are just sitting there in storage or clogging up your space are the empty calories that provide nothing of value. These objects might taste good for a short period, but over the long run they are just weighing you down and creating an unhealthy lifestyle. Even consuming too much of the healthy items can lead to weight gain if you dont control what you are letting in and sending back out. To maintain a healthy weight, the calories taken in must equal the calories that are put out. If we continuously allow calories into our homes, but dont get rid of some of the items that we already have, its inevitable that our homes will eventually put the weight back on.

We Must Add in Some Healthy Exercises

Just as exercising is part of a healthy weight-loss diet, we must put in some work to help our homes lose (and eventually maintain) their weight. Organized storage systems need to be created to strengthen the structures of our homes and support the weight of all of the items that we accumulate. Remember that the more things you have, the more work you will need to do. If you want to do less, you need to have less. Its up to you to determine where this balance lies for you.

We Must Develop New Habits

In order to get our homes organized, and more importantly, to keep them that way, we need to identify our bad habits that created the chaos in the first place and learn new, healthier habits to replace them. Just as we have to develop new eating and exercise habits to lose weight, we need to develop new strategies and systems to create a clean and organized home. Eventually, these new habits become part of our typical day-to-day activities and become our regular routines, but it takes work and intentional planning to get there. If we dont change our old ways, it wont be long before the chaos returns.

Changing our habits and ways of thinking can often be a difficult process and it will likely take some hard work and time to do this. While some of us love change and can adapt quickly, others need to start small and build slowly on the new habits that they are forming. It may take some trial and error and a few tweaks here and there, but with a solid plan in place, we can replace those bad habits with healthier ones and lose the weight for good. The Home Decluttering Diet can really be done at any pace that you would like and can easily be tailored to whatever you want it to be.