5 Quick Organize Your Home Ideas
The New Year always brings about change. Or reflection on ways to improve, pare down, get stronger, so forth. Sooner or later, it’s time to examine the amount of “things” we own. And decide how much we really need.
One of the very best ways to open up space for the new is to clear out the old. There will be a good deal of focus on Karen Kingston’s Clutter Clearing philosophy. Here is a page out of our combined books.
Look around your home. Here are 5 quick ideas to open your space and do good, all at the same time:
1. Donate clothes: you can do this in phases, or you can do it all at once. But those clothes that aren’t in your current rotation need to be moved out. My plan is always to divide my closet into 2 sections: shirts, pants that I’ve worn in the last 3 months, those I haven’t. After adjusting for season, I have a pretty clear demarcation. That gives me the overflow that I can now donate.
2. Donate cds, books to library. I use our library system so much, this is one of my favorite means of clearing out. It’s pretty easy to pick out those books and cds that I can live without. In some cases, I’m putting cds into my iTunes and boxing them up for the library. Either way, I give as much as I can here, since I borrow so much from our library!
3. Running Shoes = playground surface. As I wrote earlier, Nike runs a program called Reuse-A-Shoe that takes old running shoes and turns them into new playground surfaces. Take your old running shoes into your local participating running store.
4. Freecycle your way to a cleaner garage. Freecycle.org is a fantastic and easy resource for both getting rid of or acquiring items that others are just giving away. In their words: “It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.”. Join your local ‘chapter’ and post your items. You will be amazed by the uses people find for every day building materials, old curtains, etc. And it’s all free!
5. Recycle any and all old magazines, newspapers and other periodicals. This is an easy one: anything that you’re not currently reading is clutter. Create 2 piles: one of those you’re in the middle of reading/perusing, and everything else. Recycle the ‘everything else’ pile.
Believe it or not, I’m working my way through the list right now. Our house is a work-in-progress, but our goal is to keep moving things out to make room for the new.
