How to Stop Bringing Clutter Into Your Home

i'm danny k white author of organizing for the rest of us and today i'm going to tell you what i have learned about how to stop bringing clutter into the house i have learned a lot over the years about my home what i can handle that i have a clutter threshold an amount of stuff i can keep under control i've learned that every space in my home is a limit all of that has been helpful in this but i am here to tell you that the best most effective way to stop yourself from bringing stuff into your home is to declutter go ahead and work on decluttering focus now on getting stuff out it's going to be painful it's not going to be fun you're going to have moments where you think what in the world is wrong with me how in the world did i bring this into my house what was i thinking and all of that frustration and then the pain of actually getting rid of it because getting rid of stuff is a huge hassle right getting it packed up going through the physical effort of loading it into the car and taking it to the donation place or the psychological effort of making the phone call to schedule to have somebody come and pick it up all of those things that are super unfun but have to be done when you're decluttering they're going to change how new stuff coming into the house looks to you so for me garage sales were my kryptonite i mean like they were the they were i was the reason why my house was a mess i had brought stuff in there but garage sales were the thing that had enabled me to bring in so much stuff i love the thrill of a hunt i love a great bargain this was at a time when it was really bad for me when we didn't have any extra money and so i was able to shop for pennies on the dollar never knowing what i was gonna find and never knowing what i thought i needed whatever okay so i would bring this stuff into my home and it just made things worse and worse and worse well as i started decluttering my house i got rid of so much junk that i had never used that had ended up being you know all those feelings of you know things being a huge hassle or those frustration you know feelings it meant that when i went to garage sales yes it took some of my joy away but it kept me from cluttering my house because i could identify that right there is either the exact same thing i just had to declutter from my house the exact same thing i moved 50 million times before i realized oh wait there's no room for it here or i never did need it in the first place whatever i could identify things as future clutter because of the negative frustrated feelings that i felt when i was decluttering so there's some value in those feelings because they change how new stuff coming in looks to you make sense okay so here's an example for you my husband and i have some friends who recently moved they were living in the country and moved to town we fairly recently moved from town to country and so the friends had said hey come over see if we want to sell a bunch of things we want to get rid of some things come over and see if there's anything that you want to buy so we went over which is super fun right like i love that um but we went over and i was really proud of myself so whenever two different times one time we went to go pick up something that we had said we were gonna buy but they needed to use one more time so the first time i mean we were like we bought an outdoor heater because i had been looking at those online pricing those planning to buy one this fall um i we bought their garden tiller because you know i'm super into gardening now ish but i definitely you know hey we could pay this much or we could rent a tiller for the same again year after year so we decided to buy the tiller so we bought those two things from them and i was so proud of myself we went back to go pick up the tiller that they had needed to use one more time before they moved and he said hey he said hey um everything on this table my wife says is free everything on this table is free y'all that's the word that's the word that used to get me more than any other word free it's like my favorite word right and i looked and this is someone who had really cute stuff and my first reaction because of all the decluttering that i have done over the years because i now live under my clutter threshold because i understand that my kitchen cabinets are containers they are limits and i already have in them what i need my first reaction was i don't need anything from there okay that's huge for me like for that to be my reaction if you would have told me that 15 years ago i would have been like who is this person you're talking about like really it's crazy for that to have been my reaction but i did then see that they had these a set oh my word look how pretty they look in the light look a set of cobalt blue glasses this is my favorite color i love these things i love anything that's this blue glass and i thought well i can't say no to that and i said you know what it's okay i have a little room on my mug shelf so i am just going to put them there and then anything that doesn't fit i will get rid of some of my older mugs i will just do that because i know that if something's gonna come into my house and my house is gonna stay under control it has to have a real place and for it to have a real place i have to remove something to make room okay if there isn't an empty space there for it got it okay so i decided i am going to get the blue glasses okay i'll do that and then i saw these and they're in all different colors okay they're in all different colors bright colors and they're plastic and i was like you know what we now have a larger outdoor space we entertain outdoors a lot more i probably need those right right i need those and i just decided i'll take those because i need them and i didn't think through the whole space issue that i had thought through with these okay because i'm i'm so not perfect y'all know that right okay so i decided i would get these and i brought them home and i thought oh i don't have any room for those what was i thinking i'm just gonna have to donate them and then i decided to drink out of one one day i watched it don't worry and i realized i love these glasses caps whatever okay they're plastic i love these like there's just something about them and i started realizing that every day when i went to go get my cup of water for the day i um was excited to use one of these and i was like oh it's blue today oh it's pink today whatever but i was having these reactions to it so i have to find a place for this and i didn't have room in my cabinet and i thought oh i can put them over in that cabinet over there i could put and i thought no that's not where i look first for glasses i know because i have decluttered so much because i have improved my home so much i know what works through the process of decluttering i have to have a place for things they have to have actual space in that place and the home for something is where i would look for it first because if i put it anywhere else it's just going to be clutter because i'm never actually going to find it right i'm never going to actually that putting it over there in that space across the kitchen away from where all other drinking things are is just going to be a recipe for frustration later okay so i thought no if i'm going to keep these i have a place for glasses i have to get rid of some and when i looked at it that way i went oh we've got these plastic cups that somebody got at a dallas mavericks game or we've got this that these things can go i got rid of a formerly beloved but nobody really likes to drink out of it unless it's the only thing that's left to drink out of disney mug from going to disney in 2019. okay so it was easy once i realized no this is my space four cups so on the cut on the shelf that has plastic cups on it i like to keep my glass down here but on this on the shelf with the space for plastic wins that's where this needs to go and that shelf is a limit because otherwise i'm just adding more stuff to my home and that is how the clutter cycle continues okay instead i say this is the space that i have this is where i would look for it first i'm gonna let this space be a limit and so then i was able to keep all of these favorite ones there's several colors of pink but the days when i get to drink out of this pink it's just guaranteed to be a good day and see the cute purple i'm just telling you i love these things so much and i can keep them because i understand these basic principles that i learned through decluttering okay you hear these principles from me but you're gonna know them and they're gonna affect your home and they're going to change how you are in bringing stuff into your home if you will go ahead and declutter apply the principles see that they work see the impact that they have on your house and then let that help you make these difficult decisions also the other thing too is if i put them on that shelf over there then i'm not letting this space be a limit okay and then that is the really bad um path that if i go down that path that's how my house you know got so cluttered in the first place all right so accepting these things now when it came to these though i got rid of a couple super obvious easy to get rid of mugs and then as my daughter was putting dishes away she said hey um there's not enough room for mugs so i said okay well get rid of the worst ones because i have those blue glasses in there that i really want to keep and we have to have the space for those and her reaction was what i love our mug collection and i went oh then as she said that i realized i've had these now for a while for a while and we still have a drink out of them like nobody's choosing these it's not a great size it's not so now i know that if there's not room for a mug that we randomly run across that needs to go in there um it's the blue that needs to go over that but i let this space make that decision for me it decides if i can keep these or not okay so back to the main point which is how do you stop cluttering well first you declutter you declutter and it will eight times out of ten keep you from bringing stuff into your home that's just going to turn into clutter later because you will be able to identify it as being way too similar to something you just had to get rid of and you went through that hassle so that those negative feelings that happen while you're decluttering those frustrations that you experience then help you keep from bringing things that are just going to turn into clutter into your home okay but also when you do bring something home you go through the action of giving it an actual place in my house which means if it's gonna have an actual place and there's not empty space in that actual place where i would look for it then something else has to leave in order to create the space for this item and that means i maintain my clutter threshold because okay i can keep these i love these glasses but i got rid of old ones so that now that space is still not cluttered okay i didn't just add them to this space okay and make it a big jumbled mess that's totally what i used to to do okay so i understand that container concept i understand that every space is a limit so i do that and sometimes that means i bring something that's this great thing that i'm sure i'm going to love into my home and then i realized yeah i'm not willing to get rid of something else to make the space for this so it needs to go okay the good news is having a clutter-free home does not mean you can't ever bring something you love into your house it just means that you have to acknowledge the principles that allow your home to stay clutter free and then apply those principles you'll get better and better at it things will look different to you and you'll understand and be able to keep a house that's clutter free okay all right talk to y'all later you

Channel: Dana K White

Views: 131,295

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Id: QBRG3qlotaA

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022