Make the Boundaries the Bad Guy! (Favorite Decluttering Tip)

well today we're going to talk about boundary is it boundaries with our stuff and even more specifically how when we put these boundaries in place first it can actually make decluttering and simplifying a whole lot easier well hi I'm dawn from the minimal mom we love sharing tips and tricks about how you can simplify your house quickly and I was saying about the other day it took me about a year to really get through all of the areas of our house and to really simplify it and get to a point that felt like it was easier to maintain and my hope is that you can actually do it faster because I was about six years ago and I feel like there's more resources available now and more people doing it it's more widely accepted and so I hope that we can just spend more time together and I can help you and others can help you get through your house really quickly so if you haven't subscribed already we'd love for you to do so but today I want to talk about this idea of putting some boundaries in place for our stuff it kind of reminds me of all those books on like boundaries like boundaries in marriage and dating and relationships but it's actually not I don't know it's kind of like that I guess I don't know and so when it comes to our house our homes in some ways naturally put boundaries in place for us so if we look at our kitchen we're limited by the amount of kitchen cabinets we have and how much storage we have in there similar we have boundaries by the closets that are in our bedrooms or our front hall closet or in our bathrooms with how much space we have to store stuff so there's definitely some ways that boundaries have already been put in our house but sometimes we need to take it a step further and put some of our own boundaries in place as well and it can really help with this simplifying process because what we're doing is we're actually making the boundary the bad guy so for example I'll show you our kids toy bins in just a second but I've talked about this before we have our toy bins and the kids just know that they can keep as many toys as fit in the bins so the toy bins are the bad guy not necessarily me right the boundary is the bad guy and so we'll talk a little bit more about my logic behind that when I show you the bins but similarly I have a drawer in the kitchen and that drawer is for our dish cloths and our dish towels and so I only keep what comfortably fits in there so I'm not constantly being like oh I want to have seven dish cloths but now I have eight I'm not counting them or inventory them I just know if I have to do that thing we have to hold stuff down and push the drawer in that it's too full and I need to get rid of something so I've made that drawer my boundary and if I have to get rid of a dish towel or two I have to demote some old ones it's okay I'm not bad the towels aren't wrong no one's bad here I'm just respecting that boundary that I put in place knowing that our kitchen functions better when you don't have to push down to close the drawer right and we don't have a super big kitchen if I had a bigger kitchen I could keep more stuff and still respect to the boundaries of that space if I had a smaller kitchen I couldn't keep as much stuff and I'd have to pare it down even more so it's not a one size fits all there's not you know like hard and fast rules but I think if our goal is always to respect the boundaries that it's gonna make this process easier but more importantly our house is gonna feel so much better so now I want to show you some of the boundaries that I've had to put in place in our house so we're talking about toy bins why don't we head into our TV room and I'll show you those okay so since I started talking about the kids toys we should probably finish in that topic I love the idea of creating a boundary for your kids toys basically how much do we keep in our house and so for us we've talked about our IKEA toy bins we've had them for like six years I don't think they're available in black anymore is is what I've heard but they work great but I love that the kids know that all of their toys just need to fit in these bins so after Christmas or birthdays or different gift-giving occasions they just know that a week or two after we go back through our toys and they all have to fit in here again and so this is a way that we've made the boundary the bad guy it's not me saying you need to get rid of a bunch of your toys it's just putting that boundary in place and saying this is the boundary in our house and I know for some of you might like well that's kind of mean right but here's why I do this and why it's really important to me that we stick to this boundary is that I know for our kids that they function the when our toys are limited they play the best on their own they can occupy themselves for hours at a time I've said this I can't and again but I've learned that it's not toys that keep kids occupied it's their imagination and so they do not need a lot of toys to be creative in fact I've found that toys actually keep them from being creative and playing well on their own the fewer toys we have the better they do so I have lots of videos on toys so you can check those out but this is a boundary that we've put in our in place in our house that has worked awesome and then as long as we're in here this is in our TV room I'll also show you another boundary we've put in place in that just with our DVDs so we took them all out of their cases and just got a CD case that we put all of our DVDs in and the kids just know that all the DVDs that we keep have to fit in one of these two cases that we got and so if we get new movies that come in that's totally fine we just decide which other movie we're gonna donate or pass on and again this works well because I know now that this is more than enough between these two cases it's more than enough DVDs and so this boundary has worked really great too we just have an Ikea wardrobe in our bedroom which at first felt limiting but now I've really come to love because we physically can't keep a lot of stuff in here is I really try just to respect this boundary of how much hanging in space we have I also love for those of you who have bigger closets the idea of you have a set number of hangers and what fits on there is what you keep and then what doesn't then you part with or put in a quarantine bin and so I think that's a great way to create a boundary around your clothing as well is just to limit the number of hangers that you have and so while some would feel like oh this is so limiting or I like to have a lot of options I think having fewer options but knowing that every one of them is an actual option it's like I feel like I have more to wear now than when I had ten times as much clothing and it was spilling out of our walk-in closet I may have I may have had more clothes but I did not have more options of things to wear so I love limiting this I'm really intentional about what I bring into my wardrobe now and I just know that I get rid of things that I don't feel good in that don't feel right and I let them go I pass them on and I pick the pieces that I feel really good in but I think one of the most important places to boundaries are are with sentimental items a lot of times we have a bunch of sentimental stuff and we just don't know where to start so if we would create a boundary first then it makes it a whole lot easier so for example if I have this whole bin of pictures a lot of them are duplicates it's from a time in my life that it was like high school and college important not super important today for me right now with everything else that's transpired since then right so what I can do is get a couple of photo albums one two however many you want to keep and say okay I'm just going to keep as many photos as fit in here and yes will I be throwing away some photos I will but this bin right now is overwhelming I never go through it however if I put the pictures in an album I'm much more likely to actually flip through it once in a while the kids will want to look through it and ask me questions about those times and so even though I will be getting rid of perfectly good photos I'm okay with that because this will cause it to be in a format that I'll actually use and appreciate and the same thing goes with physical items maybe I'm going to decide that everything I keep fits in one or two plastic Rubbermaid totes or whatever fits in my hutch or my china cabinet or in a certain place where I want to display it putting these boundaries in place then that causes me to not just hold up each item and say should I keep it or should I not keep it it causes me to evaluate is this an important item to me is it so important then I'm gonna put it in the bin or I'm gonna put it on a shelf to display or is it maybe just kind of important so it causes me to sort through and really pick out the most important items and to focus on keeping those and not necessarily the other stuff that's less important because we can only manage so much inventory right and when it's too much we don't appreciate it and I don't feel like we're really honoring the people that it represents and we've also talked about our baby boxes before and so we have a box for each of the kids it started as a baby box but I still throw stuff in there occasionally and so they're not full by any means but the idea that the time they graduate leave the house I don't know maybe I'll keep it here or I'll send it with them but that it's a manageable amount of stuff that still fully honors their childhood and their accomplishments and the things that were important to them or that were important to me when they were babies but it's not so much stuff that later down the road they're gonna have to try and sort through it or I'm gonna have to try and sort through it we can really appreciate what's in there and flip through it okay something which is really fun I also have my own memory bin it's the same size and I just throw random stuff in here and so it's picture that's newspaper clippings Awards and so this is my boundary for the amount of stuff I keep again because I know if it gets to be too much I'll never go through it and it will be too much but I also I came across this you learn a tune I want to share with you and then I'll show you some boundaries in our bathroom but I know often we don't take action we don't do the work to declutter some of these areas because we're afraid of making mistakes there's no set rules when it comes to this and we don't want to have regret that we got rid of something and then down the road we decided that we wanted it or we needed it again and so this was written by Theodore Roosevelt's it says it is not the critic who counts not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of Deeds could have done them better the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood who strives valiantly who airs and comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming but who knows the great enthusiasms the great devotions who spends himself for a worthy cause Who at best knows in the end at the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least he fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat and I know we're just talking about simplified in our house but I've said this before it's one of the best things that I've ever done for our family it's made our house a peaceful place to be but also a very hopeful place it could be it feels like we can achieve things in our house when it's clean we can set goals and we can work towards them and that we have the space now to take on bigger things and bigger goals that I don't know when our house it was a mess all the time I felt like every single day I was coming up short and I wasn't doing a good job and I know I used to think it's it's just the house it just helps keeping but I didn't realize how much I was beating up myself over it and how once I got our house under control I felt very empowered I felt on top again and I felt like I could do bigger and better things and so I've said this before it's just stuff but it's not just stuff it really says a lot about us and about what we believe about ourselves and so I hope you just keep moving forward even knowing that we will make mistakes along the way but again knowing that it is just stuff in that by getting rid of it and having less inventory to manage it is going to free up so much time for you to spend with the people the actual most important things in our life okay enough of that let's head to the bathroom now okay so we have two bathrooms in our house we have our full bath and that's where Tom gets ready and then this is our half bath where I get ready and so a couple boundaries that I've put in place here I have my makeup bag all of my makeup it's gonna get hurt look and it doesn't not fit in here and then I don't keep it because I know that I'm not gonna use it again and then I also have two baskets down here under the sink and so it's not very pretty okay I would like to remodel this bathroom too but I can't tell Tom that yeah so we got to finish the other projects so I have one basket that I keep my hair like styling tools like curling irons and waivers and that kind of stuff which I'll link to the video about how i get my hair like this down below because i get asked about that a lot so one basket that that stuff has to fit in if not i know there's too much in there and i'm not using it like i just know myself now and then I have one bin for hair products and I like this because I can just pull this up in the morning when I'm getting ready it has everything in it that I need and again I just know myself in that if stuff is spilling out of there I'm setting it outside of the basket it generally means I've replaced a product in there like I've gotten a different mousse or a different hairspray I just know myself now if it doesn't all fit in that basket it means I have to my and I'm not using something and so I would rather pass it on to someone else who can make use of it then just let it go back down there because we've also learned that - right that hair products do not keep forever and I also try to erase for myself because everyone's hair and skin and everything it's different and it can change over time so just because something worked in the past and it might not work now or someone recommend something but it never works as good on my hair and they did on theirs it's just everybody's different and so I try not to be too hard on myself if I bought something now and it doesn't live up to my expectations if I can return it great otherwise I try to pass it on let somebody else try it and maybe it'll work better for them and so my hope is that if you've been feeling a little stuck don't know where to start that it might be helpful to start with the boundary first so look at what it is you're trying to declutter or organize and say okay what kind of boundary can I put around this so that I have a guideline for how much to keep and what to keep I have a friend who had like 60 washcloths under her vanity in her bathroom and so we came up with the idea that she could put a basket under there and what fits in the basket stays and what doesn't then she passes on or does something also and so it's amazing how just kind of changing the way we look at it can make a really big difference and I'd love to know are there certain areas that you're thinking about now that it might be helpful to put a boundary are there areas that might hang you up a little bit that you're not sure what kind of boundary you could put in place for it leave those questions down below we love to brainstorm with you but thank you so much for watching I hope you're doing well and I'll definitely look forward to visiting it with you again soon

Channel: The Minimal Mom

Views: 219,204

Rating: 4.967483 out of 5

Keywords: minimalism, family minimalism, minimalist, the minimal mom, the minimalist mom, minimalist home, how to declutter, decluttering, simplify, simplifying, sentimental items, how to simplify my house, boundaries for stuff, simple living

Id: R1YOP0Cuelo

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020