New Year’s Tips to Declutter Your Home

Don’t be afraid to Declutter Your Home! Welcome to 2014! It is a New Year and a fresh start to keep your home clutter free after the chaos of the holiday season. The holiday decorations have been properly stored. Now what? The year has started off with winter storms and extremely cold weather, which means that you are stuck inside. This is actually the perfect time to act on your New Year’s Organization Resolutions. There is no time like the present to start planning and acting on how to declutter your home and make it more organized for the New Year! Starting the Project According to organization experts, Peter Walsh and Julie Morgenstern , to start your home reorganization project, you need to create goals and follow these steps:

1. Create a goal and final vision for the space that you want to reorganize. Cutting out photos of an organized room and putting them on the refrigerator or on a bulletin board in a room is a great motivating tool.
2. Define your clutter. We are all very emotionally attached to our things; which in turn causes more clutter to gather in our homes. This is a good time to sort your items between keep in room, place in storage, donate, sell, or throw away. Do you really need to keep the 10 bridesmaid dresses in the back of your closet or the 15 different sports teams cap?
3. Work in small projects. When you are decluttering your home, start with smaller projects, such as a junk drawer or a closet. You will have a stronger sense of accomplishment when you complete the smaller tasks and it will give you motivation to tackle the larger projects.
4. Donate the items that you don’t need to organizations that could use them. Donate books to a library or school. Shelters and donations centers, such as the Salvation Army or Goodwill, are great places to donate clothing.
5. Remove all excess items out of the home as soon as possible, so they won’t clutter up a garage or basement. If you can’t let go of an object, pack it up and place it in a storage unit. ezStorage  has 45 self storage facilities in the Baltimore, Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. areas that are a great option to store those items that you just can’t get rid of, but no longer have the space for.

Keeping Your Home Clutter Free Throughout the Year Now that you have your home clutter free, it is time to keep it in the same condition going forward. Below are some great organization tips to continue to keep your home clutter free throughout the New Year:

1. Do daily cleaning, such as clean your kitchen after each meal.
2. Put away daily items into their designated spots after use. Use shelves, storage bins and baskets to keep these items organized.
3. Finish the projects that you started! Do not leave projects half completed!
4. Sort your mail right away. Place magazines and catalogs that you won’t read directly into the recycle bin and place bills and other mail that have to be answered in a specially designated spot.
5. Stop impulse or recreational buying. This causes more clutter to be brought into the home. Think through your purchases.

With proper planning and a goal in mind, you can declutter and reorganize your home and start a plan to keep it organized going forward.