Forget Spring Cleaning! Spring Decluttering will Help You Find Peace and a Place to Park Your Butt!

By Jackie White

Hello Spring! I love Spring! It is a time for renewal. It’s a time for hope and a fresh start. It also is a time when many of us start our spring cleaning. If you are anything like me, it’s not the cleaning so much that I need to attend to, it’s the clutter! The clutter brings me down, yet I am just as guilty as the rest of my family in adding to its hold it has on our home.  So, this year I am doing something different. I am proclaiming this year that I will do spring decluttering!

I am going to declutter with the motive being not only a clean and organized home, but also a space that will promote peace, calm, and be a soft place to fall at the end of the day. Think about that for a minute. What would that mean to you if your home was your little spot of peace on Earth? Did I hear a collective sigh of relief or was that just me? I would love to come home to a place where I am not dealing with moving piles or running a list of to-do’s through my brain. I am on a mission to tackle this problem and I have researched why this is so important to attend to.

Benefits of Decluttering Your Home

1. Your environment will go from chaotic to calm. You will no longer walk in and think that there appears to have been a struggle! You will only see calm surroundings.
2. Feelings of stress will be replaced by feelings of peace. Can you imagine it? An oasis or sparsity? No shoes to trip over, just a clear walkway to a clear couch for you to sit upon and read your book peacefully.
3. You will find missing stuff! You might realize that now you have 14 hammers, but the good news is that you sell 13 of the 14 and make a little cash-ola!
4. The once stagnant overwhelm that wore on you is gone. You only see a place of comfort and rest.
5. No more tripping over things or bumping into things. You no longer live in a danger zone! The environment is safe to move about without risking your life.
6. Your bank account is a bit bigger because you no longer are buying doubles of things you can’t find plus, you sold off all the other crap. 
7. You can walk into your home and not feel that the stuff is overwhelming you. You see only the things that are meaningful and make you happy.
8. You are free to dance more, sing more, and just enjoy life more because clutter isn’t bringing you down.
9. That feeling of being overwhelmed is gone. Your mind is clear and you can think without the chaos.
   
   
   

Finally, your energy is restored! Clutter sucks the life out of you. Feel good that your stuff is being passed on through donation to someone in need.
​
​​Now that you are on board with this whole spring decluttering, let’s hop to it! The first thing to realize is that your house didn’t get this way in one day and it won’t be undone in one day. To do this without getting crazy dedicate 10 minutes a day to decluttering certain areas. I suggest choosing the least likely area to get re-cluttered immediately. I know at my house just as soon as a surface is cleaned off someone moves their crap right in and undoes what I just did. That is very demotivating. If I have a spot, a cupboard, somewhere that is staying nice without the attack from my family, I feel accomplished. Eventually you have to move into the most frequently used spaces and that’s when you have a talk with the family about keeping things nice.

Jump Start:
For those of you who may want to make a dent faster, go for the 40 bags in 40 days. Commit to filling a bag with at least 40 unwanted items a day for a few weeks. This decluttering system works great with kids too. Tell them they have 15 minutes (set a timer) and they have to get rid of 40 items in their bag.

Take Action Daily:
No matter what process you use to declutter, take action daily with a master checklist. This will ensure you get through all of your rooms without dragging on the process forever. 

Try This:
To do a total refresh, empty your room out and only put back what really makes you happy. Everything else has got to go. You can donate, give it away, or trash it, but don’t set it down for further review. It will become clutter again! Look at your room as if you were a new buyer of your home. How can you envision it? Ooo! That’s kind of exciting!

Resources
The best resource I have found so far is FlyLady.Net. She has decluttering and cleaning schedules and processes to follow that are straightforward. Other books that have been helpful are The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo or The Minimalist Home by Joshua Becker.

Wishing you the most fab spring season decluttering and freeing yourself from the crap that’s been weighing you down!

Shine On!
​