Generally speaking, I find White’s advice to be very practical. Start with the easy stuff--take out the garbage, do the recycling, move as many of the things as you can without having to make big decisions. It needs to be done so just do it. While the world seems to be in love with the idea of tiny houses and minimalism, many of us simply can't purge it all and start from nothing. Yet a home with too much stuff is a home that is difficult to maintain, so where do we begin? Add in paralyzing emotional attachments and constant life challenges, and it can feel almost impossible to make real decluttering progress.

Living now means open floor space so my sons can wrestle. It means I can walk to my bathroom in the middle of the night without stubbing a toe. It means my daughter has space to dance around in her room. If you feel like traditional cleaning and organizing advice is written in a language you never learned, you're exactly the person for whom I wrote this book. I didn't understand, either.There is no stuff put aside in keep piles to deal with later so the house doesn’t become more messy in the process of decluttering. How To Help Family And Friends Declutter

So, for years we had a Bible study at our house and we served dinner, for sometimes up to 22 people. Now this meant I needed a lot of cooking equipment, dishes, napkins, coffee mugs, dessert plates and silverware. And that was when I made a conscious choice to live in the phase of life I was in. Right then. I decided to stop assuming I knew what I’d love to already have in the future. See that? That’s her paper copy with an (estimated) ba-jillion notes! I loved meeting Sandra of Plum Prairie Ranch! My advice is to go through the steps, focusing first on all visible clutter in the room, working on floors and surfaces and open shelves. pg.66 There's a constant rotation of dishes and newspapers and school projects going onto and off of our table, but that table can't be the permanent resting place of anything that doesn't directly contribute to eating dinner as a family. Cute vase, napkin holder, and a salt and pepper set? Great. Printer, paper shredder, and jewelry tree? Nope.Decluttering isn't Stuff Shifting. It it's rearranging or buying a new shelving unit or sorting into slots or drawers or baskets. Decluttering isn't organizing. Decluttering is stuff you don’t need leaving your house. And that’s really all it is. If five things leave or five hundred things leave, you’ve succeeded.

I had to develop decluttering strategies out of necessity. I couldn't go on living the way I'd been living, with stuff (quite literally) spilling out of every cabinet door, covering every surface, and taking up every last available space in my home. Between this book and a bit of journaling (which I’ve also had time for this week) I’ve come to realize how much progress I’ve made in the organizing of my household and I’m feeling quite optimistic about it. We moved into our 1,752-square-foot real home from the 960-square-foot apartment and purged huge amounts of excess that we’d never needed. And we still ended up with more stuff than space.

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Access to a private, four-week book club in March. We’ll do these through a private (though not secret, as I learned last time is way too much hassle) Facebook group where I’ll go live once each week in March, discussing sections of the book and answering your questions. Once I defined clutter this way, I finally understood why my friend and I can buy the same décor, and her house looks like a magazine but mine looks like a thrift store. I have a Clutter Threshold, and it’s unique to me. My Clutter Threshold is the point at which stuff becomes clutter in my home. When I’m living above my Clutter Threshold, there’s more stuff in my home than I can handle, and my house is consistently out of control. Living under my Clutter Threshold helps my home stay more naturally under control. I found mine (and you’ll find yours) through decluttering.

Her main idea is the Container Principle: seeing your closet, your refrigerator, your bookshelf, your bedroom, your pantry —hey, even your house—as a container. It is the size it is. After preliminary tidying, you decide which stays according to the limits of your "container." I assumed there was a solution lurking just beyond my current organizing abilities. Someday, when I reached that elusive State of Organization, my stuff would all work together perfectly, and I'd be glad to have whatever I already had. In Decluttering at the Speed of Life, decluttering expert and author Dana White identifies the mind-sets and emotional challenges that make it difficult to declutter. Then, in her signature humorous approach, she provides workable solutions to break through these struggles and get clutter out--for good! Not only does the author provide strategies, but she dives deep into how to implement them, no matter the reader's clutter level or emotional resistance to decluttering. She helps identify procrasticlutter-the stuff that will get done eventually so it doesn't seem urgent-as well as how to make progress when there's no time to declutter.I know these things are obvious, and I would have said they were obvious to me too. But I wasn't living like they were obvious. The steps are: 1. trash, 2. easy stuff, 3. the duhs, 4. asking the 2 questions (if I needed this item, where would I look for it? + if I needed this item, would I remember having it?), 5. make it fit into a container (shelf, box, cupboard, etc.). Step 5: Make it Fit (Realize that your house is a container and your dressers, storage, closet, bookshelf, etc. are all containers too. You can only keep what fits in the container and anything extra needs to go. So put your favorite books on the bookshelf first and any extras go, for instance.)