Spring into Organizing: 19 Ways to Jumpstart Your Decluttering

hi clutter fairy fans welcome to the February 26 2019 clutter conversation webcast I'm your moderator at Gumm Nick and I'm speaking with Gail Goddard a professional organizer and owner of the clutter fairy in Houston Texas our topic today is spring into organizing 19 ways to jumpstart your decluttering before we get started a few notes for anyone who's joining us for the for the first time Gail will present a list of ideas to get you moving and then we'll have time for your questions if you have a question as we go along feel free to share it via the chat and I'll try to make sure Gail answers it before we get away to another topic you can use the also use the raise hand feature to let me know if you'd like to ask a question or make a comment yourself via audio or video and now over to you Gail hi everybody welcome to the February 20 19 you Stan cutter coaching meetup event online I'm so happy to be here with you guys today and I'm happy to have people from out of the United States listening that's super exciting our happy friend Denise from France who's been following clutter fair for a long time showed up is in a live event today so I'm super excited to have you Denise thank you so much we are going to talk about 19 ways to jumpstart your decluttering because it's a hot second before spring down here in Houston and that gives you the sensation of it's time to air things out and open things up and start straightening up it gives you that little feeling of I need to start cleaning out the stuff and so as spring approaches and you start getting that pull what do I want to do how do I want to do it you need some projects to get started so we're going to talk about those today I actually spent a lovely day on Sunday cleaning out the patio we had one break in the dreary rainy weather for 24 hours we had a clear blue sky and low humidity and beautiful sunshine and so that's when you open all the doors and windows and you let all the breezes come through the house and you start airing out your stuff and it feels like it's time to let the fresh air in and so I got to do that on Sunday it was just a little teaser because the jury weather is about yes so we're not quite there but it was the it was a little teaser to tell us that spring is just around the corner so it's time to start thinking about what is going to happen next what's your first spring project you're going to get into when the spring finally arrives and you're ready to take on a tackle a project so let's start our list number one clear out your junk drawer everybody has that junk drawer in the kitchen and it's one drawer whether it's a small or a big drawer depends on the kitchen but it's going to be a drawer and in that drawer is a hodgepodge of stuff that you have swept off the counter thrown in the counter because something landed in the kitchen it didn't have anything to do with the kitchen and you wanted it off the counter so you threw it into that drawer I think when people move into houses they decide they need a junk drawer because they want to have a few tools in the kitchen and they want to have some stamps and they want to have some rubber bands you know there's a few little things that they think should be in a junk drawer in the kitchen and then over time it just becomes the local dumping ground for anything that ends up on the counter that you don't want to look at anymore and you shove it in the junk drawer so this is the perfect small container it's a few hours to you know pull it out sort all the contents find out what's in there and then you can make some decisions about what should be in the junk drawer again you know you're gonna reset the junk drawer to hold the things that you actually want to be there yes I want a screwdriver yes I want a flashlight yes I want the spare set of housekeys no I don't want you know a Christmas card that came while I was unloading the groceries and no I don't want this piece of trash and you can make those decisions about what should be in there and then take everything else out trash recycle there will be things that landing in the drawer that really belong in another place in your house and so you can go distribute those things to the next place in the house and then you will have a junker that you can actually manage once you decide what's going to stay and you cleared out everything it's going to go then you can containerize the contents in the junk drawer so you can get random little small containers that are you know they're usually need to be no more than a couple of inches high so that the drawer can open and close easily but you can containerize the contents with any container that will fit in the drawer so glad we're Ziploc you know containers that people use or you can go to the dollar store or go to the Target or wherever and buy some little thin containers or there's also expand to fit junk drawer inserts that you can put in that basically create a bunch of compartments and it just expands it's designed to slide out wider to fit the drawer exactly so you can go low-tech and get out the gladware that you have in the house already or you can go you know more fancy and go buy something specifically designed for a junk drawer but either way you can get something to help you containerize what and ends up being the permanent residents of the junk drawer and hopefully now when you open the drawer you'll be able to see in and find what you want and it won't take very long to do it that's definitely a couple-hour project okay number two clear off the floor of your closet and I say this because I often go into clients houses and you open the closet door and you can't walk into the closet because there's a bunch of shrapnel on the floor this is another place where people stash things that they don't want to deal with like they come home from the store and they've been shopping and they throw things into the bottom of the closet floor and close the door without unpacking or putting anything up they kick off their shoes they throw clothes off that are dirty and throw them on the floor and eventually the floor is covered and you can't wait you can't get to the clothes in the closet on the hanging on the clothes roads because the floor is covered so a closet is not typically an afternoon couple our project revamping an entire closet is going to be a day or two days depending on how many clothes and how much you have to try on and how dense it is and how many other things are in the closet but you can do you can take stay do stage one of that closet by just clearing the floor so that's a perfect spring project do it for a couple hours uncover the floor and you can come back and do more closeted later you're gonna find shoes in there that are you know gotta find all the matches the parts may be all over the place so find all your shoes and match them up pull out everything that is an unpacked bag or if you took your own tote a reusable bag and carried stuff and then threw the tote in there it's time to unpack all of those onion patch totes and take all the parts and put them away you're gonna probably find things on the bottom of the floor that really don't belong in the closet they just got stashed there because somebody was coming over or because it was making you annoyed or you tripped it in the middle of the night or whatever there's going to be some things that need to come out of the closet and go to the place where they're supposed to go maybe you have a piece of luggage in there that you took on a trip and you came home from the trip and you never unpacked the luggage completely or at all so now is the time to pull that off the floor unpack the contents and you know take the luggage and put it away where it normally lives if you can just spend a couple hours to clear off the floor and don't look up at all don't concentrate on anything over your head just uncover the floor then after a couple hours you should be able to walk into your closet again and completely and then you you have a launching pad for you to come back another day and focus on cleaning out the rest of the closet and all the trying on clothes and all of the stuff you have to do in order to make that happen so clearing out the floor in the claws is a perfect spring projects free cleaning project number three go to the medicine chests in your bathroom or bathrooms plural you may have it in more than one place after you miss this little tiny cabinet little bitty shelves there's not very much in they don't hold a huge amount of stuff but typically they have things in there that expire so you're gonna have medications in there that need to be vetted and thrown away that are not safe to use anymore and you're gonna have things that are current that you've been leaving on the counter because there wasn't room in the medicine cabinet and so I would go through all the contents in the medicine cabinet pull everything out get rid of stuff that you don't want anymore re including make up lip balm you know anything that's not prescription but other kinds of appointments I guess or potions or lotions that are in there make sure it's stuff that you would use and make sure that its current and you consider it it works for your own sense of safety about whether you'd be willing to use it or not and then put it back in this is another place where getting long thin containers that are you know 2 inches tall and long and probably only 2 inches wide at the most maybe an inch and a half they make long long narrow containers that are perfect to sit on those little skinny shelves inside of a medicine cabinet so container izing in there will help you hold up all those little lipsticks and all the little things with a yep there's all these little bottles and jars that are small and skinny and tiny and floppy they always are fallen over in the medicine chest and so putting some containers into that medicine chest and getting rid of the stuff that you don't want will allow you to take things off your counter that you're using currently and putting them into the medicine chest instead that's a project that you can tackle in a couple hours for sure and end up with a really functional medicine chest again number 4 head for the linen closet the thing about the linen closet is that there's always a whole lot of stuff in like people stuff blankets sheets towels all the pillowcases all the hand towels all the wash rags those all of the sleep it's a sleeping bag might show up in there the bedspreads might show up in there this decorative pillow cases might show up in there you're gonna have all that kind of stuff shoved in there but when you fall all that stuff up it each one of them takes up a whole lot of space like one sheet said it's gonna take up a space this high so while it looks super stuffed and overwhelming in reality when you pull it out it's not that many pieces it's not like you know the the it's not like trying to empty out the silverware drawer in the kitchen where there's a million pieces in there there's going to be a whole lot of space but it's not full with that many pieces so pull all the contents out and sort and just match up all the sheet sets oh well here's the pill for that set over here and here's you know pull all your pieces together again and then start subtracting what is not being used so lots of time people add into the linen closet and they never take out and so if you actually pull it all out you're gonna find sheet sets in bed sizes that you don't own anymore a lot of times people will have twin sheets from when their kids slipped on a twin bed but they've long since graduated to a queen or vice versa they had a queen and and that one left the house and you replace it with a twin because the room became to do a purpose room so you're gonna have sheets for beds that you don't own anymore so those sheets definitely need to go and then the sheets that actually fit on the beds that you own and are using you want to vet those for is the stretch is the stretchy part of the fitted sheet still any good is is it really stained is it really sticky ugly scratchy fill-in-the-blank right take all those sheets out that you would not actually put on the bed because you don't like them and leave yourself with a set of here's two or three changes of sheets and that should be plenty if you have two or three changes for each bed size or each bed if you prefer that way then you should be in great shape to handle anybody that's coming to use any of your beds the thing about blankets is and everybody gives us blankets we receive them as gifts a lot Christmas time there's oh here's a new fuzzy blanket you will probably have a gazillion blankets in the house and you will not be using all of them and so even if you have 15 guests you will probably have more blankets than you need for even that invasion of people so you want to vet through all of the blankets that you've shoved into the linen closet for when it's good when you're gonna need all of that and try to get down to how many people are actually gonna have in the house how many blankets would I ever require in one day in one sitting and get the population down to something that makes sense to what your possibilities are let's take up a huge amount of room and so even if you take out one or two you're going to get a bunch of breathing space back into the linen closet the same thing is true for towels we tend to buy matching sets of towels and then we upgrade the bathroom or we change the decor we buy another set of towels and so the old towels get in the closet and they're still good but you'd never put them out because they don't they're not part of the decor anymore or you wouldn't put them out because they were scratchy or you didn't like that they didn't absorb the water very well or whatever there's gonna be lots of towels in there that you would not use now because they're not they don't meet your standards whatever those standards are it's time to take those out and donate them to a vet any kind of a vet that is doing any kind of hospital work or are boarding work or grooming work is going to be using a ton of linens sheets and towels and blankets are a perfect kind of donation to give to a vet so if they wouldn't work in your house and they won't like you wouldn't be comfortable giving them to your friend or giving them to Goodwill because they're not in good enough shape you can absolutely take those things to a vet and a vet doesn't care what they look like they just care about the fabric so they are a great donation to give to a vet if you do that in the linen closet you will end up with a huge amount of breathing space the other thing you'll find in the linen closet is it's kind of this central house storage place for other kinds of things so while you're pulling out the linens you're probably going to also find the stash of candles or candle sticks or old pictures or whatever you can vet those as a separate lot if you want one day as a spring cleaning project I would just concentrate on the linens getting them under control and then putting back in an organized matter what you want to keep okay all right next is number five imagine that you had a party and right before the party you're like oh my god we got to hide all this paper and you've swept a bunch of mail off into a box and you went stuck in a closet somewhere if you have one of those mailboxes boxes full of mail in your closet somewhere in the house that you stashed spring cleaning is the perfect time to go get that box out and go through that mail it's going to be super well marinated at this point it will have been in there and you will have ignored it for a long time and now if you bring it out to go through it it's going to be bills that you've already paid it's going to be events that have already happened it's going to be grocery store circulars that are months or years old it's going to be super easy to sort this paper old paper is fast paper that's what I'm saying so now's the time to pull out that box go through all that mail find the one piece of paper that you've been looking for for months and let everything else go to recycling your trash that will make a huge dent anybody that's ever taken a container filled it up with mail and shoved it somewhere has used up a couple of square feet in some closet or room or corn or somewhere that you can uncover just by pulling that out and sorting that stuff out so tackle it and it'll be easy because it'll be old and you won't have any problem getting through the paper I promise number six particularly in the spring after the holiday season has gone by you know this somewhere in your house is a four foot high stack of magazines and catalogs am i right somewhere in there is a whole bunch of magazines sitting around on the coffee table in the corner in the magazine rack and in the back in the kitchen on the counter there's magazines in little piles everywhere so as a spring project tackle those magazines and catalogs run out run around and grab all those piles bring them together and sort through them and I would tell you that the best way to do it I think is to sort it by date first so you can sort it by year and you know these are two years old this is last year this is this year and then the stuff that's this year I would sort by month and then give yourself some kind of a cutoff imagine you know I'm gonna throw away everything six months or older or I'm gonna throw away everything a year or older and see if you can let yourself apply that cutoff rule to the stack of magazine so everything this is a 2017 magazine can't throw it away cool it's for the cutoff see if you can let that go now I know everybody has a favorite magazine if you're into decorating for instance you probably have a subscription to Architectural Digest and you just love that magazine so you want to keep all of the copies of the Architectural Digest but the rest of them you can apply the rule to so if there's a if there's one or two magazines where you're keeping them all fine you can pull those out but then apply your cutoff rule to everything else and if you can do that then you can probably wholesale out a whole bunch of paper they can go to recycling or can go to some kind of school project or something like that where people are cutting things out I will tell you when you try to take things to school the magazines they don't want magazines that are racy so things like vogue the ads are too racy and the parents get twitchy about that so you may have to be a little bit more careful if you're going to donate them to use somewhere if you find an artist or a classroom that is interested in having them you got to either vet them make sure they're happy with the contents or let them they're gonna throw away some that they think are not appropriate for the kids otherwise you put them in the recycle bin you move on but if you can just pick see what your cutoff rule is and make that application cut them off and let them go behind the cutoff rule you will thin the herd immensely catalogs you don't really need to cut off as much as you need to find the current one the most current version because all the other versions once the new version comes out the newest catalog comes out what's in the new catalogs what's actually for sale what's in the old catalog is now no longer applicable so it is still for sale it's in the new catalog if they've sold out of it it's not in the new catalog so the old catalogs need to go for sure and that's an easy one to like I'm not buying from them oh I've got the new j.crew catalog I don't need the other 47 j.crew catalog right so you can let go of the stuff that way it's real easy and it's magazines and catalogs take up a lot of room and it's really easy to thin that herd and give yourself a bunch of space back and you can do that definitely the pen how much of an avid magazine collector you are you can really make some space and then the herd and a couple of hours any trouble hey Gail great comment from Sheila she said we donate our old magazines to our local chemotherapy infusion center and she says as a former chemo patient I can say more centers are in desperate need for reading materials for patients right because you're sitting there and you're trapped for however long you have to sit there and get the infusion and you're bored out of your mind right what a great idea and you know what we're in the Texas Medical Center here there's got to be some waiting rooms around that need that that's a great idea so and for you know people that are getting chemo you know it's the vogue isn't too racy right that's a perfect example of here's a whole bunch so then if you know then you're if you're worried about your name you can you know use the marks a lot if you want to scratch your name off of it or you can cut out your label or peel if sometimes you can peel the label off but either way donating them to that kind of an environment that'd be great when they along that line if you think about like a dialysis center thank you yes I also Center that has people sitting there for hours at a time a Veterans Administration Hospital yes right they have big waiting rooms and people have to wait for a long time yeah that's a great idea that's perfect exactly and if you have a huge ton of magazines and you don't feel comfortable with dumping those and recycling find yourself a waiting room and make the trip that is a great great idea thank you Denise added she's she's taking her she's arranged with her dentist to drop off magazines tomorrow today than the ones they already have excellent okay this is one that I see a lot and number seven do you have a million plastic grocery bags in your kitchen somewhere when when I go into clients houses I find little squirrel dawei up in this cabinet shoved in this drawer under the seat next to the refrigerator in the pantry there's little wads of plastic bags tucked in everywhere and at some point it gets out of control because I guess people think you know I'm just going to push another piece of plastic in there it's like well sure you can continue to stuff plastic in there forever it collapses really well but eventually you're gonna fill up the space with plastic bags so this is the perfect time because you're going to the grocery store however often you do either a couple of times a month up to you know every couple of days you're going again with another couple of bags and if you're not using recycle and you're bringing home plastic or paper you're stuffing those somewhere most of the time so this is a perfect time spring cleaning project to go and pluck all of those out and make one big recycle bundle of these plastic bags because there's some grocery store in your neighborhood that will recycle them and there's a bin you know stuff them in and so pull them out pull pull pull from everywhere make one big bundle and take that one bundle back to the store the next time you go shopping it will make a huge amount of room and you can start your quarterly stuffing again with the new plastic bags but in the meantime you have created some air in your cabinets which is really great number eight time for all you moms out there to dig out all the paper that your kids have been bringing home from school all kids come home with a constant barrage of paperwork in their backpack that is stuff that the teachers want you to look at want you to sign here's the artwork they did here's the paperwork that they they got graded and handed back and it goes back and forth and the kids come and dump it out and you end up with this big pile of paper we're in the middle of school year right now so you may not feel comfortable tackling and stuff from this year but it's the perfect time now that it's spring to go into last year's pile of paper and filter it now for the stuff that you actually want to keep now that there's some distance between you and when this stuff freshly came home and oh look mom here's my new piece of artwork right this is stuff that's going to be a year old and you have the whole years for the school work to look at in one sitting and so then you can pluck out you know the representative samples of the things that are really great examples of their artwork or school work and you can let the rest of it be recycled and doing that in batches this year for last year school work all the way they go through school we'll save you a zillions hours when your kids go off to college and you have this whole hot school year or 12 years of school history that you've kept all this time for the kids and they're gonna be what reacting badly when you want to box up the entire you know closet full of their paperwork and ship it to them somewhere so if you can work this spring on last year schoolwork then you can thin that herd down to something that is manageable that you like to look at that they might look to like to look at sometime in the future and it won't be an overwhelming job so get up that paperwork filter through it you'll be happy you did later okay number nine is check out the cabinet's under the sink in the kitchen and the bathrooms for some reason those places are kind of mini junk drawers that when there's something that appears in the bathroom that you don't know what to do with you kind of shove it under the sink it seems to be the the parking place for I don't know what to do with it and under the kitchen and in the bathroom both so sitting down one spring day that's lovely and pulling all those things out and deciding what really needs to be there I have cleaning products for the kitchen that I will use in the kitchen sink or using the kitchen that makes sense in there here are some cleaning towels that make sense in there there may be other things that you want to have under there but if it doesn't make sense there then the stuff that has landed there by accident probably needs a new home so you want to be able to easily get your cleaning materials in and out from under the sink and whatever else you're storing under there sometimes people put the box of trash bags down there or they put the extra soap under there or something if it's a place that you want to use as sort of excess inventory for kitchen cleaning that's fine but you need to arrange it so that the excess is in the back and the stuff that you're using right now it's in the front that kind of attention so pulling everything out and pulling anything that doesn't really make sense in there and finding it a new home and then going back in and arranging the things so that they're easy to use is a perfect afternoon doing that in the kitchen and also in all the bathrooms sometimes people like cabbing here's the bathroom cleaning stuff in the bathroom and that's fine if you have some cleaning materials in the bathroom that it's going to clean that makes perfect sense and then check and see what else is under there that doesn't make sense it may be that you don't have a whole lot of cabinet space in your hem and you use that for some storage and so installing some containers in under there that you know they make things they're specifically designed to stand around that here's the pipe in the middle and there's a half of a container on top of a wider container below there's things that are designed to work in conjunction with all the plumbing that's underneath the sink it will help you containerize and manage the stuff that you actually want to be down there number 10 pick a file cabinet drawer we all have a file cabinet in the house it's got a full of paper and the question is how old that paper is if you go and pull a file cabinet drawer I would start with the oldest one and just concentrate on one drawer don't worry about the hole all of the cabinets drawers just pick one and let that be your afternoon project and you can pull it out and make a first pass at all the files within that drawer and even under a first pass parameter or you're not going to have to think too hard about it you should be able to pull a bunch of paper out as out of date no longer appropriate don't need to retain it anymore you know this is expired I don't own that thing anymore or whatever the whatever the rules are around it as you go through but there should be lots of files that you can filter and thin in that drawer without too much work now you may have to come back another day and make a second pass and that second pass would be where you have to be a little bit more thoughtful and pay closer attention but again just like paperwork before the older the paperwork the easier it is to decide that it's okay to let it go and so pick a drawer make a first pass open the files flip them real fast and see what kind of stuff can come out in a hurry and then you can get a little bit more breathing room in that file drawer and you may find that you don't need anything in it and you can throw it all out and now you've got an empty file drawer this is along the same lines of old papers fast paper right the older it is the easier it is to make the decision so as a couple I don't want to be committed all day I just want to be committed for a couple of hours pulling out that file drawer and working through it is that great start to finish project you can get done in a few hours along the lines now you're in the office right let's talk about office supplies number eleven is who has a big stash of office supplies and you have to ask yourself this question I know that you love them all but the question is are you really going to use all these awful supplies for a lifetime you probably have enough office supplies to stock an office of twenty people right because we get it as gifts we pick it up in - in any kind of a store there's little supply somewhere at the counter you impulse buy it you it's one of those things that everybody sees it as useful and fun and cute and we all grab it whether or not we have a hundred and fifty pads a post-it notes at home we buy the next pad opposed to no because it's in a fun color right and so this is one of those things that you can accumulate it over a period of time end up with a huge quantity and never in your lifetime possibly get through all of it so this is one that's easy to filter so go into your office or wherever you have the office supply stash pull them all out and look at them and say I have 150 post-it note pads I'm probably not gonna write that many post-it notes in my life maybe I can keep ten and I can let the risk go because you know some teacher that is dying for office supplies they're spending their own money to supply their classroom in the United States which is shameful and they're trying to do the right the best by their students and so they're spending their own money and you can take those office applies and donate them to a school a classroom a daycare center any kind of a nonprofit organization if you give them supplies and they don't have to spend money on the supplies that you are donating so there's plenty of places where those supplies can be used and you just have to get yourself um filtered get your contents down to what you're gonna use in your house may get a working set and then let the rest be donated away somewhere where somebody's gonna use them right now it's not usually you're not going to be out of huge amount of money because you did office supplies aren't that expensive and it'll be worth it to somebody who doesn't have to spend their own money on it it's an and it's an easy thing to do in a short period of time number 12 computer geeks you're up so this project is one that is very recycle based it's time to go find all the electronic gadgetry in your house that needs to be recycled so there is probably a million cords ipods old phones old computers old ipads old nukes electronic readers I once took I once helped somebody move out of the house and they had lived there for a long time and she and her husband were both early adopters so they had huge amounts of technology in their house that were long since outdated you know the twenty years old and in in the tech world 20 years is a brick it's useless right so they had a ton of material I actually filled my car to the brim with all of the electronic recycling they had and then when I went to the recycling center they're like we don't normally take this much we only take five things than a dime so I scared them a little bit the recycling center but I promised I wouldn't do it all the time and they they let me empty my car if you have a bunch of recycling sitting around in various drawers in corners in parked whatever it's time to pull all those together and make your trip off to recycling and let them be reclaimed there's metals inside them units that usually need to be reclaimed and if you take them to a proper recycling center the plastic and the metals the metals that can be pulled and the plastic will be recycled and you can feel comfortable that it's not just going into the trash it's worth the effort so that anything that is basically outdated outmoded isn't sitting around taking up space and making it crazy and if you can pull the Associated cables with it then there's that many less cables in your house that you're fighting with going what does this cable go to why is it here I'm afraid to throw it away because I might need it except that if all of your current electronics have their cables and you know where the cables are then you don't need the cables that are unmatched you need them to go away so let those get out of the way so that they don't make you insane I'm always find a bin of I don't know what these cables are that somebody has thrown all the cables in a big bucket and stuffed them in a closet somewhere and then they never look at them again they never pay any attention to them so it's just a way to reassure us that we're not throwing away something important and truthfully if you do throw something away important you'll be able to go and buy another cable it'll be okay you'll be able to recover but there's probably you know 50 cables in your house that go to electronics that no longer work or you don't have or whatever and it's time to let them go so this is a project you can concentrate on getting electronics out of the house it's been a couple of spent a couple hours searching them all out matching up their cables and then donating that stuff I mean uh recycling that stuff to get it out of your house Natalie added most of the domestic abuse centers will take your old cell phones oh oh that's true because then they like re program them to cut to dial nine-one-one right okay yeah that's a good idea that works for the phones they probably don't want the tablets and the e-readers and that kind of stuff but if you have a bunch of phones laying around and anybody that has more than you know any family with you know parents and kids there's a bunch of phones floating around and every time you change carriers or the phones everybody gets upgraded and suddenly you have a whole wad of phones that need to be laying around somewhere so donating those you know resetting them to the factory setting and wiping everything out and giving those away is a great idea next and we're 13 we're gonna go in the kitchen when was the last time that you emptied your pantry pantry is a great couple our project and it's a very active zone it's a place that you go in and out of all the time and you're constantly adding new stuff in and pushing things to the back because you're pushing new shopping trip stuff to the front and you know after a few months the pantry is pretty full unless you are unless you're a shopper that buys today for what you're going to cook today and that stuff circulates pretty quickly if you sort of bulk buy and then shove it in the closet a lot you may not use it as fast as you buy it so the pantry is a place where you can pull stuff out look for all the expired stuff and let that go you can look for the things that you bought to try and then you didn't like it like I tried to get my family to eat quinoa and they hated it or that I tried this cereal flavor and nobody liked it there's going to be food in there that were attempts and fails and those can go like if nobody's ever gonna eat it then you tried it it's got to go let it let it go this is a perfect place to get rid of the old stuff reset the pantry because it's such a high use high-traffic area you need to pull out everything and get here's the bag with you know an inch of chips still in it and the chips are long since stale here's the bag of pasta that I opened and it's been open for a year because we didn't use all of it and I'm not sure I want to cook that anymore you can make your own judgments about what you what your sense of safety about what is okay to eat and served or not but use that filter to thin the content and then reorganize what is put like with like and reorganize those contents and put back what you've got the pantry is one that it's not just an annual thing because it's so active it's just like the fridge you're constantly putting things in and out of it and so resetting it once a quarter is a great project to make your life easier in the kitchen and it keeps if you do it once a quarter you will keep oh you will stay aware of the contents of the pantry and you'll be able to go oh yeah I have that can of blah blah in there and I can use that today you'll more you'll be more likely to use up what's there and then you know when you buy fresh you've got fresher product in there so it's a great project to do in spring and reset but also do that once a quarter like spring and then do it again in three months and it'll make your ability to cook and function in the kitchen much easier all right after pantry we're going to talk about number 14 is time to pull out all those receipts in your purse this is true for men and their wallets as well but we tend to grab receipts and stuff them into our purse without thinking about it every counter that you go to you're buying something somebody hands you a receipt and you shove it in the purse somewhere right and if you are not somebody who's actively turning those and taking them out and dealing with them putting them where they're supposed to go then your purse is full of a bunch of floating pieces of papers oh the spring cleaning project the perfect thing to dig out take your purse clean out your purse pull out the receipts find out what needs to be there or what doesn't they're not all tax receipts they don't all have anything to do with being deducting anything so your food receipts are likely not something you have to worry about clearly the food is consumed you can't return it so any kind of eating the only thing is if you are if it's a some kind of business expense you want to save it if it's a meal with a client or some kind of if there's some kind of business purpose for that receipt but otherwise you're out with your girlfriend's having a glass of wine and you know there's no getting that wine back you've already drunk it so this is a got a receipt that after you make sure that it hits your bank properly or a couple days go by and nothing goes wrong then you can wad that up and throw it away right and if you use this as a clean all purses project so if you're going to clean out your one purse that you're currently using if you're one of those people that changes purses all the time or changes them every few months and you don't completely clean out the last one it's time to pull all those purses out and clean them all at once I promise you're gonna find that lipstick you've been looking for for months it's in one of those purses that you never cleaned out and it will remind you what purses you have back there and if you clean out some of the purses and decide yeah I'm done with this and I would never carry it again then you've cleaned it out and it's ready to be donated so that's a great project to go pull all of the purses that have been in use and have stuff in them dump all the contents out sort sort sort and then you can stock the current purse with what you want you can get a whole lot of trash out of there I promise there's a lot of trash so this is a perfect project to sit down for a couple hours the men's equivalent of that is going to be the wallet the laptop bag if you have more than one laptop bag I've had men clients who had 15 laptop bags because they like changing the laptop bag all the time so if you're one of those persons that carries a bunch of different containers just consider this you're clean the container project and pull them all out and dump them all out and find out oh yeah I took all this stuff to the accountant and I never put it back in the files or I pulled out you know here's I was sick that week and here's all my dead clean X's that I need to throw in the trash there's gonna be a lot of stuff that'll be easy to throw away and they'll be plenty to recycle and then you'll find the three receipts for the here's the shirt you're trying to return and here's the receipt that needs to go in your tax file and you'll find a few things that you need to keep up with and then the rest can disappear and you'll be so happy because the persons will be clean and the wallets won't be three inches thick when you sit on have you seen that like some time guys are like they're like trying to fold their ball and stuff in their pocket yeah kind of clean it up oh yes Denise added some shops here are asking now if you want the receipts and that's happening that seems to be happening more and more here as well and especially for all the little itty little bitty papers from the cash register when you buy bread or a newspaper and yeah if you're not if you're not using a credit card that you're gonna want to reconcile if you're spending cash and it has no tax implications go ahead and say no don't need that receipt right yeah and I've noticed to that and people are using Square registers and where you sign electronically at the register you know you don't have to have that receive either so it'll send it to you by email or you can refuse it they won't and automatically print it so you're right and isn't that wonderful because we don't need to wad that piece of paper and put it in our purse anyway you'll know when you're standing there this is a business receipt I need to pay attention to this I might you know I'm buying these clothes for the kids to try on and I might have to bring it back you don't know whether it's a receipt you need to keep up with or whether you don't care right so I think it's totally worth it to say no as many times as you can is there anything else it yeah Petra added same here also we don't get free plastic bags any longer you have to pay for them that brought down the number of plastic bags considerably so yeah if you're if you carry your own bags you can cut down on the clutter cut down on the plastic going into the landfill and save save little money save ten cents or whatever they're charging right so then here's the here's the clutter that's generated by reusable bags so when you go shopping with your usual bags and you bring groceries in most the time the groceries get unloaded but when you use reusable bags for durable goods a lot of times people will bring them home and then not unpack them they don't consider it part of the shopping expedition to come home and undo it so that's when you're gonna find those I went to the store I bought fill-in-the-blank I put it in my closet because I didn't want to deal with it and then three months later you're digging out that bought that bag and emptying it in order to oh yeah I went to Target and bought that fill-in-the-blank right um and people use them to take here I'm taking my paper to the accountant here I'm gonna go meet my friend here I'm going to that meeting and here's all the contents for that meeting and then they come home with the bag and they don't unpack it so you just have to loop into your routine when I bring a reusable bag home I need to unpack the contents and do what I'm gonna do with the contents when I come home otherwise it's gonna get parked in the corner and then you're gonna have 15 bags sitting around going where are all my use reusable bags oh they're all full of stuff from previous trips so just make sure you loop that part of the process in and then you'll be in good shape hmm are we okay can I go on yes okay number 15 is think about the bathroom stash of lotions and potions and makeup that you have in your house this is one of those gifts that is if you think about the holidays and you go in every store there's some little tape somewhere that's covered with gifts back gift boxes to have lotion body wash air spray yeah that kind of stuff in it and they're sort of super generic easy gifts to give people and they have male and female versions you know they have ones that have you know men's cents in them for instance we also buy this stuff for ourselves we also receive it as gifts at other times the year you take the shampoo and a conditioner and a soap from the hotel when you go to the hotel room we all have tons of stash of body cleaning products hair shampoo conditioner any kind of lotion mask whatever there's a million things like that right this is a perfect thing to go and decide okay this is a volume that I can never use in my lifetime I am one shampoo bottle that is you know twelve ounces or 16 ounces is going to take you three months to use so if you have 15 of them you're looking at years worth of shampooing that are already in your house right now so the idea of keeping all of those things because they're useful is not a sufficient filter because you are you know that you have more than you can physically use in your lifetime or in a reasonable in a decade you can't use them in the decade before they start to turn and you don't feel comfortable using that lotion on your skin anymore because it smells funny so this is the kind of product that you should have the stock of things that you like and a little bit of back stock not a huge amount and then all of that excess needs to go somewhere else and this is the perfect thing to take to a women's shelter a men's shelter any kind of a nonprofit that's providing services a church that has a refugee program or resettlement program or you know emergency support your house is on fire and we provide you with you know additional stuff when that kind of there's all those kinds of projects out there that are half or people are trying to help others in desperate need and they can use these kind of products and so taking them out of your house and not letting them die in your cabinet but indeed sending them on somewhere where there's a high volume of use would be a great use of these products and it's an easy thing to do you've received sense that you don't like you've received flavors that you don't like the feel of you don't like the smell of you don't like the consistency of there's all kinds of products in your house in your bathrooms right now that is never going to get used nobody likes needs to go so call through that whole collection pick the ones you like if you have a bunch of makeup you need to go through and make sure that they pass the safety test they pass the smell test you don't want to be using makeup that's the liquidy or lotion your appointment that is you know decades old who knows what's growing in there right so you need to be safe about what you put on your face and you need to be using the current products and then the rest of it needs to go and some of the stuff it really should go in the trash but and whatever your your threshold is you use your own judgement and then let's take the stuff that you're not going to use in the next decade or the next five years the next year let's let all of that go on someplace that could really use the products there's no reason to keep 150 bottles and I have seen 150 bottles in somebody's house like it's not everybody thinks of it as useful and yes you can use body wash forever and okay but you you personally can't use 150 bottles in your lifetime and so putting that somewhere where they can be useful is a really good thing to do and get you a whole bunch of space back and get you with the products that you actually want to use and that you will enjoy using and that's the point Nick number 16 if you have kids it's time to recycle their clothes right little kids grow out of their clothes in a big hurry certainly the younger ones they change clothes really quickly probably a couple of times a year they're in a new size again and so once a spring time is a perfect time to go in and go okay here's I'm in the kids it and I you know exactly what they can and can't wear you've been putting it on them all year so it's easy for you to go in and bet and say I don't you know they can't wear this anymore this is now she's stained oh this one's so cute I love this one kids clothes can be cycled out and left with the things that actually work and if you're gonna if you're like saving or boxing things for a younger kid you want to pull those out of the closet if the current kid can't wear them and the younger kid isn't big enough yet it's time to pull those out and box them and put them away and throw out the things that have been destroyed the kids have you know gotten the marker on that they've thrown up on too many times whatever anything that's too stained you know you can filter that out and this is a perfect time to donate to your girlfriend's that has younger kids donate to a local shelter there's always places for kids clothings to be donated that it'll actually get you so use this spring project as a couple hours in the kid's closet to filter out their clothes and cycle in it's time to see what they're short of and what they have grown out of and give them a good working set and get all the things that don't matter anymore out of their face because they don't want to have to filter through it to find the clothes that fit either and that'll be true the older that they get the less the less likely they're going to want to be looking at the stuff that they can't possibly wear so time to filter out the kids clothes okay number 17 I'm gonna say the word of the day the word of the day today is shoes we all love our shoes and we all have way too many of them almost everybody that I go into their house they have absolutely too many shoes it's time as a spring project to look at your shoes and decide which ones can be moved on because you know you got shoes in there where the plastic is starting to get sticky and there are rubber soles that are starting to crumble from all the age like not all of the products of the shoe have the same shelf life and they don't survive as long so you think the shoe is in great shape and then all of a sudden you reach in to put it on and the insole crumbles on your foot there'll be it's dying in there the product the materials that are used to made the shoes are dying at different rates and so there going to be some materials that died sooner than others you need to go in there match up the shoes there's things in there that our size is too small that you'll never be able to get into there are things in there that you had a momentary you know brain aneurysm and you bought a color or a heel height or a strap or something that didn't work it looks terrible you would never put on all those need to come out people that are madly and over their shoes usually give over a huge amount of storage space to shoes but the truth is if you haven't touched them in a while you need to go in and touch them again you need to put them on you need to see if you would actually wear them or if they hurt you need to see if the materials are dying in place even though they look perfectly okay in their boxes you need to pull them down and see if anything's falling apart this is the time to filter out the shoes and give yourself more room to keep the ones that you're actively using and currently love and if you're one of those people with 200 800 1500 pairs of shoes all the more reason to go through and make sure all the materials are in good shape and you know thin out the herd because you know you're gonna keep buying them you might as well get rid of the ones you're not gonna wear right I know it's the people that are into shoes it makes their head explode to think about giving up shoes but even if you just get rid of 10% and you get rid of the ones that are actually falling apart you will be making some space that will help right and it will help you manage what you're keeping so with that in mind go process your shoes I'm just saying a couple more comments go ahead Denise said our local food bank accepts clothes the food bank can be used by anyone two weeks ago we dressed a man for a job interview and he got the job that's awesome and she also added the Red Cross cells old unwearable clothes by weight and uses the money to give food vouchers or buy fuel or gas for people oh that's awesome that's a great idea okay so cool those are all good donation locations thank you okay we're down to number 18 number 18 is your bedside table your bedside table is the catch-all that on your way to bed as you're falling asleep all these things get tossed over onto the bedside table if you're somebody that reads in bed or if you retire to bed to relax take naps during the day or you spend an hour - before you go to sleep at night or if you spend a half an hour before you go to sleep at night where you're functioning in the bed before you go to sleep there's gonna be a huge amount of stuff on that nightstand that you know here's the medicine that you were taking while you had a cough and here's your water and here's the cough drops and here's the Kleenex and here's the cords and here's the blah blah blah right there's always a million stuff in the nightstand this is a perfect thing to take as a spring project and empty out that bedside table all the mail that you took to bed to read all the magazines II took to bed to read all of the medicines and things that came out of the bathroom all of the change that came out of the pockets there's no telling what's on that bedside table I've seen a vast array of things that have been taken to bed to deal with and then put on the table so this is a clearly a very active zone for most people and resetting that once a quarter it will really make it easier for you to get ready for bed and do your thing so it's probably a lot of stuff that need to go live somewhere else it's time to take off the things that really you know you used them for a minute and now you're not using them it needs to go back to where it came from there's and there's probably magazines in there that need to be part of the magazine call when you're going to do the great magazine hunt you need to go find the ones that went to the bedside tables and pull them out book readers usually have a ton of books by the bedside table the ones they're reading and the other seventeen that they read last year and the other eighteen that they're gonna read next year there's usually a lot of books around the table so making a way for those to not live exactly on the bedside table but maybe be stored some other place nearby would make your bedside table a little bit more functional and then you can use it for I'm reading these this book these two big books these three books right now and you only have those on there instead of everything that's in waiting or already complete this is just a zone that you want to use for what really helps you get ready for bed and helps you relax in the bed and the things that you like to do there and you don't want it to be overloaded things falling off the side you know if it falls off the bedside table it's likely end up behind the bed or against the wall and you're going to lose track of stuff so this is one of those places where having a few shallow containers to hold things so that they don't just slide off the back of the bedside table is a good idea and to thin the herd regularly so that it still functions for you as a useful space when you come to bed so cleaning that off and resetting that space is a great couple hour project you can do two sides of the bed and if there's drawers or little you know cabinets or shelves as part of the bedside table depends on how your table is built of course but it's usually something that you can handle in an hour too and it's a perfect project to get your spring reset and here's the last one for today number 19 is the garage and I say that garage because the garage has a lot of hot spots clearly cleaning out the garage is not a afternoon project there's no there's hardly any garage the United States that can be done in an afternoon it's usually an entire weekend or two weekends of work to clear out and reset a garage however there are usually little hot spots in the garage if you go stand in this corner and work on this pile you can work with the gardening tools or you can work with the here's what we've been through tossing all the cardboard boxes to be recycled or saved for mailing someday right there's always a little squirrel pile in the garage that you can go spend a couple of hours and you can do it on a beautiful spring day when it's lovely outside and you can leave the garage door open and you can be out there in the lovely air you know in August in July in Houston you can't do that outside because you will have heat stroke oh this is the time that you need to do it in other parts of the country it won't be the same but for us and going in the spring in the garage is the time where it's actually pleasant enough that you can be out there without having to go to the emergency room for you know sunstroke and so don't tackle the entire garage as one in one sitting you want to pick an area that here's a bunch of trash or recycling that I threw out there and this is the place where the garage is the place where everything goes to die when you are sick of looking at it in the house but you can't quite deal with it you're not ready to face it you will throw it out in the garage to deal with it later or I can store it in the garage and then I don't have to give it up this is the place the last stand where something goes and still belongs to you on its way out the door and the truth is if it's been sitting on the garage for a really long time you can probably go look at it and say yeah I really need to like do the final step and send this on to donation I need to put this out for heavy trash I need to you know take this back to my friend whatever it is whyever it got banished to the garage you need to you know pick the last step and take it on and so this is a place where you can go and find some of those I need to deal with this little squirrel pile of here's this big bundle of recycling that I never took well it's time to go here's the Christmas decorations that I didn't want to put up or I didn't want to use this year well I need to put them up or donate them whatever it looks like for you and whatever it translates for in your garage find the piece that is the one afternoon corner and you know hang out in the lovely air and clean out that one corner your garage you'll be happy you got started and you know you can spend a few weekends in a row doing a little corner and eventually make your way around the garage and get it ready for the summer because then you know you guys start doing more gardening and more yard work and you have to spend a whole bunch more time in the garage so think of it as the beginning of your spring clean out for summer beautifulness in the yard okay so that is our list try a few of these clearly if you did all 19 of them you would be spending your entire weekend in the house and that is no fun on a spring day so pick the couple of them in here that resonate for you and spend a few hours straightening some stuff up and do that a couple weekends in a row and then go out in the lovely air and enjoy your spring when it shows up we don't want you to miss the beautiful sunny lovely sky that is on its way I promise it's coming I'm telling myself that as I'm looking out at the gray and rainy weather right now okay so who has comments or questions now for us well I put out a call a last call for questions on the chat and all I got back was Denise saying I'm fine just going oh my god oh my god that is so true we are about out of time Oh awesome okay so before we go I want to let everyone know about upcoming events oh yes our next on line cutter conversation event will be on Tuesday March 26th 12:01 p.m. Central Time we'd love for you to join us live visit CF Hou comm slash HCC m1903 I'm gonna put that in the chat and I'll also show it on the screen for people who are not watching the video later okay there you'll find information about how to participate in the meeting on Thursday April 25th at 7 p.m. we'll meet in person at a healing collective in Houston we should get caught Denise and I'll put it put a URL for the chat and on the screen that one as well we'll announce topics for both of those events soon if you'd like to receive notifications about upcoming events we invite you to join the meetup group at meetup.com slash Houston - putter - coaching you can also follow us on Facebook or subscribe to our mailing list we'd love to hear from you so please send us your questions and topics suggestions in the YouTube comments and you can always reach us through our website at clutter-free Houston comm okay that's it we are so glad you guys came today thank you so much and we will see you next time happy spring

Channel: The Clutter Fairy

Views: 37,494

Keywords: Gayle Goddard, The Clutter Fairy, professional organizer, Houston, Texas, spring cleaning, organizing tips, small projects, home improvement

Id: VLfGLHtOlVM

Length: 62min 22sec (3742 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2019