Decluttering is one of the best first steps in making your home a place that you can design well and enjoy; the problem, sometimes it doesn’t “take”, even after hours of effort and hard work. Don’t be discouraged! I’ve had the same problem, but today I’m sharing some of the solutions I’ve found.
Have you ever worked for days on a space, carefully purging and sorting every last thing, color coordinating and making labels like a boss, feeling like it would last forever?
Maybe you even made a few runs to get the perfect organizers for the drawers and baskets for the shelves, only to see it look like a disaster zone in a few short months?
Story of my life, girlfriend.
By nature, I am an organizer and declutterer. Some of my earliest memories are of purging my entire room at four years old. I guess its a kind of therapy for me.
And I know I’m not alone in this.
The problem was that it never stayed pretty for very long and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why.
Now I have a houseful of kids and they most definitely take their toll on my best organizational aspirations, but the problem was more than that.
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A few years back I read the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and the lightbulb went off.
In the previous years, I was keeping way too many items that I didn’t actually love and trusting that the world’s cutest containers you mask my overabundance of things.
All the things quickly became a burden to manage and I just couldn’t keep up.
The method taught in this book was mostly about how to stop asking so many questions while I was decluttering and why making broad sweeping decisions like “I love all my books” wasn’t enough.
Each item needed to be held quietly in my hands and analyzed on its own.
It was a paradigm shift, to say the least, and took some time to learn how to listen to my honest thoughts on my possessions.
It has been three years since we have set our home up according to the “Kon Marie method”. The first run through was an intense ten weeks, which I detailed in my 10 Week Decluttering Plan.
I was very glad to be done. And even more excited to see just how long it would last.
That was three years ago and we are still at a good place.
I must say, it has indeed been life changing. It’s not to say that things don’t age out or get a little messy, but I can quickly get us back on track with some touch up work.
To quantify this, originally, I spent 14o hours decluttering our entire house. Since then, I need to spend about 15 hours a year on touch up work.
I will be running through the ten week program again to tie up some loose ends again for 2019, starting this week. If you want to join me, grab your copy of my ebook and follow along in my Instagram stories.
Let’s do this together!
Click here to access and print off a copy of my Decluttering Flowchart before you get started.
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