Tackling the Clutter

It’s a new year. Everyone is setting goals, people are tacking their clutter and I’m pondering what this year holds for me.

My home is our haven – soothing, beautiful, comforting, but sometimes, admittedly cluttered. I’ve come to terms with the fact that my biggest home hurdle is dealing with all aspects of it.

Some days, I manage it well, other days, I step over it. I’ll get there, eventually, but feel free to join me if this is a struggle as well. No unrealistic cleaning lists, no “everything has to have a place immediately.” Is there something we can do this January  2016 that would be helpful for us to do together? I’m all for accountability.

While I shared this post a few years ago, I am still trying to put one foot in front of the other and conquer it!

This is a fun post, which takes the same bent as my 7 Highly Effective Ways to Raise Lazy and Entitled children post and it surely gets you thinking.

Read the comments. They are JUST as good as the article. 🙂
dividerHow to Clutter the House in 12 Simple Steps. It's easy!!

I was reading this Washington Post article full of “practical advice when kids have too much stuff,” and it really got me thinking. Eliminating excess can be quite the project for any of us. It’s a big reason the Clutter Countdown is so important to Jen and all of us! So I started thinking.

What if instead of decluttering strategies, we flipped the coin and started focusing on ways to actually bring more clutter into our homes?

We could stop saying “Don’t do this” and “Never do that.” We’ve got enough rules in our lives, right?

So just for fun, here are

12 simple, silly steps you can follow to get your house nice and cluttered. 

I think we’ve all done one or two of these a couple of times!

I can’t wait to read what you’d add to the list.

1. Always bring home the freebies – the booklets at grocery stores, the soaps at the hotel, the pens at the banke. Never use them. But just bring them home.

2. Keep every magazine that comes in the mail. Make giant stacks with them. One day, it’ll be an awesome side table.

3. Hang onto the heirlooms that you don’t really like and display them in the center of your living room just because they belonged to someone you knew.

4. Walk into a store where you know you don’t need anything.

5. Keep a file in your cabinet labeled “miscellaneous” or “interesting.”

6. Always have two of everything. It’s useful to have a second can opener in case the first one breaks when you’re opening a can of tuna.

7. Really build a collection of something cool that you’ll never actually use – like cookbooks if you don’t cook.

8. Save all the crayon stubs because you might make them into candles one day. It looked super neat on pinterest.

9. Keep every greeting card and note you’ve ever been given. And not just the romantic ones from your husband, but also the kid you babysat in 1989 and the card on your pillow from the cruise line, for a cruise you took in 1995 to celebrate your grandma’s 80th birthday.

10. Always have more books than shelf space.

11. When you use up the last of a cosmetic product or facial cream, keep the containers.  You never know when you’ll need an extra one when you travel.

12. And finally, this one comes from a reader of mine at Making This Home, because she found this to be the case in her aunt’s home: Keep everything. Keep a box of really short strings. Label it “Strings too short to use.”

Now, let’s keep this list going.

What simple step can you add to keep your home cluttered?

Don’t forget to join me on our Clutter Countdown as we finish tackling our homes just a bit at a time (no more than 15 minutes at a time.).

31 Days Clutter Countdown
Katie Clemons is a storycatcher and journal crafter. She blogs at Making This Home about simple, handmade living from a vintage airplane hangar in Montana, USA.