When you are a homeowner, you will eventually have a buildup of stuff you don’t need. Whether you have a pile of junk accumulating in your garage, in your attic, or in a corner of a spare room, you’ll need to clean out the clutter, sooner or later. Although it might be tempting to keep some of this stuff because you think you might need it again someday or it holds some sentimental value, you can’t let it keep piling up. We all need to get rid of clutter at some point in our lives, so here are some ways that can assist you.
To start, you should go through your stuff and figure out what you may want to keep and what you should discard. As you’re doing this, sort everything into boxes, such as stuff you know you want to keep, stuff you definitely want to get rid of, and stuff you’re not too sure about just yet. This provides you with a system as you try to figure out what exactly you want to do with your used stuff. When you’re sorting everything, make sure the rest of your family agrees with what is being kept and that is getting thrown out. You wouldn’t want them to get mad at you for throwing something out that they wanted to keep!
Even though we’re getting closer to the end of August, there are still a few weeks of warm weather left, so you may even want to consider having a yard sale. Some of your items might not hold much necessity for you anymore, but they might for some other people. This could be a great way to earn a bit of money, especially with the holidays coming up in a few months. Just make sure to provide your items with fair prices, or else you’re never going to make a sale!
In terms of clothing, you should also think about donating them. I’m sure you have clothing that you don’t wear anymore that’s either hidden away in boxes in your attic or hanging near the back of your closet. If you haven’t worn these clothes in a long time, consider giving them to people in need. Before you do that, you might want to give these clothes a wash to get any dust off. Afterwards, you can donate them to one of many charitable organization, such as the Salvation Army, Goodwill, Dress for Success, or Purple Heart Pickup. If you have any donation bins around where you live, you can always bring them there as well.
Recently, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate released results from a survey they conducted about how the design philosophy of feng shui influences Chinese-American homebuyers, and there are ways you can use these principles to get rid of clutter. When applying feng shui, one of the most important things you should do before cleaning clutter is to make sure that you have an abundance of positive energy to prepare you for the task at hand. Whether you choose to listen to some of your favorite music or go for a jog before you begin cleaning, you must be in as good of a mood as possible when you set out to declutter your home. Remember, you might get a little emotional as you go through your belongings, so having some optimistic energy will make this undertaking easier to handle.
Cleaning out your clutter doesn’t have to be an all-day activity, but it will most likely take more than one day to get it all done. The standards of feng shui dictate that you should not spend more than 30 minutes on your first three cleaning sessions. Seeing as this can be a rather emotional task (depending on what you end up throwing out), a half hour during these first few sessions will be plenty of time to spend on decluttering. This isn’t something you should try and rush through in one sitting, but is a task where you should commit a little bit of time to over a few days. As you become more used to the decluttering process, you can even choose to start doing it for longer sessions.
Going back to the three boxes, it’s clear what you should do with the “Will Keep” and “Won’t Keep” boxes, but the “Maybe” box can be a challenge. According to feng shui principles, if you find that you cannot decide what to do with the things in that particular box at the moment, place it in storage, and then mark your calendar six months from that day. If you can’t remember what was in the box once six months have passed, donate everything that’s in it; don’t even bother opening the box. Yes, this might be a hard decision, but if you can’t recall what was in the box, it most likely wasn’t very important to you. If you still don’t know what to do with whatever is in the box, open it and remind yourself of its contents. If you can’t decide whether to keep the stuff or get rid of it, repeat this process and return to the box in another six months. When you come back to the box the second time around and don’t remember what’s in there, then either get rid of it, or ask a friend to help you sort through it. Again, this can be difficult to do, and you may feel some negative emotions at having gotten rid of everything in the box, but soon after, you will know that you made the right decision because you won’t have those connections to items that you don’t acknowledge much.
Once you rid your home of any clutter, you will feel much more refreshed at having cleaned out any unnecessary stuff that has piled up over the years. Yes, it can be hard to throw some items away because of the emotional attachments, but if you don’t have use for them anymore, then there isn’t any point in keeping them stored away collecting dust. If you have a pile of stuff you would like to remove from your home, now is as good of a time as any to do so. You’ll feel much better, trust me!
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