Spring always puts me in a clutter-busting mood - out with the old and in with the new!
There are many good books written by professional organizers that can help you to de-clutter and organize your home.
Author and life coach Gail Blanke has written a very useful book entitled Throw out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life. She guides you room by room and gives tips and examples of how she has de-cluttered her own house. Blanke advises you to get rid of both physical and emotional clutter that can drag people down. For example, she recommends getting rid of outdated medication. Blanke believes that "surrounding ourselves with a lot of old medicines is negative, robs energy and may even warm the way for those old ailments to remake their homes in our bodies." I took Blanke's advice and brought a large bag of expired vitamins as well as prescription and non-prescription medicine to my local pharmacy, where they disposed of it in an environmentally friendly way.
The magazine Real Simple has some excellent organizational ideas. For example, I used to have disorganized piles of papers for each member of the family. Real Simple recommends purchasing binders to organize papers. I bought and labelled a binder for each of member of my family, inserting clear plastic page holders to keep sports schedules, notices, etc. neatly tucked away. I can now find important papers quickly. I also used to stuff recipes into a cupboard after I had printed them out from the Internet. I would open the cupboard to a landslide of muffin, soup and pasta recipes. I now have a binder to hold them. More organizing ideas can be found in the book Real Simple: The Organized Home.
Professional organizer Laura Wittman is a self-professed "organization junkie." She has written Clutter Rehab, a book that lists 101 of her favourite organization tips and tricks. Tip #10 advises people to take pictures of sentimental clutter. Wittman says, "The biggest reason that we hang onto stuff is the memories attached to the item." Wittman recommends keeping memories alive with photographs of sentimental items. Another good tip is #50: If you haven't used something in a year, get rid of it. She recommends placing a dot or sticky note on items that you aren't sure anyone is using and write the date on a calendar. If the item is used, remove the dot or note. If the dotted item is still in the same place one year later, get rid of it. This same trick can be used to weed out a full closet - place stickers on clothes, and remove them when they are worn. At the end of a season, donate the clothes that still have stickers attached.
I find it a struggle to organize my kitchen cupboards - particularly the cupboard that holds frying pans, pots and cookie sheets. Stacey Platt is a professional organizer who has written What's a Disorganized Person to Do? It is a book with "317 ideas, tips, projects and lists to unclutter your home and streamline your life." To organize bakeware, Platt recommends stacking pans vertically. To divide a cabinet, she says to use rows of small, spring-tension curtain rods, or purchase dividers. To organize pot lids, she advises the installation of a pot lid rack, organizing the lids in baskets that can be easily pulled out of cupboards or putting them in a deep drawer. Platt's book is full of helpful lists and colourful pictures of organized spaces that will inspire the reader to create neat and tidy spaces in their homes.
Vancouver-based professional organizing duo Susan Borax and Heather Knittel have written Good Riddance: Showing Clutter the Door. They approach the topic of de-cluttering with common sense and humour. They dare readers to "dream of a life minus the burden of CRUD: Completely Ridiculous Useless Debris." They issue CRUD challenges that urge people to rid themselves of unneeded, outdated items. Some items on their hit list include: macramé, TV tables, plastic bags, old TV remotes, food containers, glass vases from florists, half-melted candles, knitted pot-holders, doilies, cracked china, dried flower arrangements, tiny bottles of shampoo, soap slivers and shoulder pads. The authors claim that "once these worthless items are removed, clutter will cease to cause chronic dissatisfaction with your living space." More helpful tips include: "One in, one out" - i.e., if you buy an item that is a replacement for something you already own, get rid of the old one.
Visit your library to find these and other books to help and inspire you to conquer your clutter.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every Wednesday. Lori Nick works at Terry Fox Library in Port Coquitlam.
