Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
You get home from work after a long day. Exhausted, you hurriedly change into sweatpants and plop down to veg out for the evening — only to discover your favorite chair is covered in dirty laundry, junk mail and other clutter. All you want to do is relax, but you end up spending the better part of your evening living around clutter.
Sound familiar?
We’ve all been there. Life gets hectic and some of life’s more menial tasks get in the way. Removing clutter from your home is just one way to organize and “clean out the junk” from your life. StorageMart President Cris Burnam recently wrote an article over on Score.com detailing some of the most effective methods of removing clutter from an office environment. Let’s take a look at how you can do the same at home. The simplest way to do this is to classify everything in your home into three categories:
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The “Need and Frequently Use” —
This is the category that you’re probably going to want to lump most of your stuff into, but I would really implore you to take a critical look at how often you actually make use of some of the belongings in your home. Do you really need that box fan in the middle of winter? How about all those winter coats in the summer? Sort out those items that are truly necessary and dedicate time to actually organizing them. The second step, then, is to master the discipline of keeping them organized once you do!
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The “Need and Infrequently Use” —
Going back to the aforementioned seasonal items like clothing or recreational items like bicycles or pool toys, it’s important to accurately assess which of these are going to be useful within the next couple months and which aren’t. If you can’t imagine using it within that time-frame, look into getting a self-storage unit so that you can dump that stuff into your unit and out of your home. This is also extremely helpful for collected items or heirlooms that you can’t bear to part with.
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The “Don’t Need” —
This might be the hardest category of all, because we all tend to develop a tendency to want to keep anything and everything available “for a rainy day.” But if you want to truly free yourself from the disorder in your home, it is necessary. Otherwise, all this time you’re spending removing clutter will be in vain! Find family or friends who might be interested in some hand-me-down furniture or electronics. Get rid of clothing that no longer fits by donating it to a charity like Goodwill or the Salvation Army or even drop them off at a StorageMart location to donate them to Charity Storage, an organization that holds auctions on donated items to support other charities.
If you fully commit to organizing your home into these 3 categories, you’ll quickly find yourself living in a utopia of organizational bliss. Once you’re living the organized life, you might even end up noticing several other benefits when you get de-cluttered. If you need help with the ‘need and infrequently use’ pile and don’t want to fill your closet or garage to the brim, give us a call! We have room, lots of room! Find a storage unit in your area today.