As seen in the Dayton Daily News on June 17, 2017.
Wouldn’t you love to wake up one day and discover your home is organized, easy to clean and your belongings can be found the first time you look for them?
You can make this your reality by making decisions on everything you own, one piece at a time.
Let’s go room by room and take a peek at some of the items you might consider starting with.
Kitchen: How many coffee mugs do you need? Come up with a specific quantity then gather them all on the counter. Put your favorites back in the cabinet and donate those you no longer need.
Family Room: Do you really have time to read all of those books or watch all of the movies you been saving? Do you enjoy other activities besides reading or watching TV at home? Think about how you really like to spend your time and get down to what is realistic for you.
Master Bedroom: Your master bedroom should be a place to relax in. Treat yourself to a quiet retreat by recycling unread magazines from past years, donating clothes that don’t make you feel good about yourself and giving away shoes that hurt your feet. If items in your bedroom are collecting dust, that’s a good sign you might not miss them.
Bathroom: Old makeup can be full of bacteria and unhealthy for you to use. Older products used closest to your eyes can be the most harmful. Pare down to the basics by keeping what you use on a regular basis.
Children’s rooms: Get your children involved by putting several boxes in the hallway outside of their rooms. Ask them to fill the boxes with clothes and toys they no long want. It’s important to let them make the decisions. If they get rid of something you want to keep, it goes in your space not back in their rooms.
Medicine cabinet: Find out if your local police station will safely dispose of out-of-date or unneeded medicine. Keeping old medication in the house poses a risks that they may accidentally be swallowed.
Home Office: Here’s an area that collects quantities of office products we’ll never live long enough to use. Let go of those freebies pens that don’t write well, the years’ worth of excess paper you planned to use as scrap, junk mail and expired catalogs.
Storage areas: Go through your boxes and boxes of memorabilia and pare down to just a few mementos. Have one last hurrah while looking through every accomplishment, then let go of much of it. That way you can find more time to accomplish what is important to you now.
Don’t get too hung up on where to start. Pick any area and start making decisions.
If you struggle with parting with anything in these categories, consider letting go of just half for now and see how that works out. I’ll bet you won’t miss them. Keep in mind, whatever you don’t let go of today will have to be dealt with again in the future. If organizing is not the way you want to spend your time, let go of as much as you can the first time around.