Clean Up Your Life: Home Edition
January is here and it’s the time I like to encourage clients to purge and organize their homes. After the holidays is the perfect time to start the year feeling right and in order. Our world is chaotic enough and with everyone's schedules being jam-packed we all frequently feel overwhelmed. Your home should be your sanctuary and a place of refuge from the craziness of the day. I'm not sure about you all but having a neat and organized home just makes me feel so much more calm, confident and ready to face all of life's other challenges that get thrown my way.
General Organizing Tips + Tricks
Research the organizations you want to donate your unwanted items to. Everyone loves the convenience of Goodwill however, when it comes to specific items I like to find organizations who could really use those items such as Habitat or ABCCM etc..
If you have a large job rent a dumpster. I love renting a dumpster if you are really going to be purging the whole house. Most companies will rent you a dumpster for one week at a reasonable rate. It feels so good to toss those items into the dumpster.
Learn how to handle sentimental items. This one is one of the hardest things I've had to work with clients on. I understand everyone loves their great grand-mothers punch bowl (if you have never used it we are donating it or I'm going to show you how to use it in your kitchen as a fruit bowl), kids artwork and those little figurines you bought in Spain 15 years ago on vacation, but if they aren't being displayed or use what's the point in having them??? As far as kids art I always like to tell parents to pull those beloved items out and toss the rest. I like to direct clients to use a service like Plum Print to turn the old artwork into a beautiful book that they can have forever.
Kitchens
I like to tell clients to keep your items close to where they use them. An example would be keeping coffee mugs near the coffee maker instead of across the kitchen. I tend to also have a lot of clients that love to entertain and therefore they have a million serving dishes, pitchers, disposable party items etc... For the