Five Ways To Declutter Your Home

To declutter your home is a cancer cure? Well, even I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but the fact is, a cluttered home can be a cause of stress, and the more stress you have, the more open you are to getting all manner of illness and disease.

So if your home has more piles of stuff than you would like to admit, and it’s starting to drive you batty, take a look at the following five tips to declutter your home.

1. Have a “miscellaneous” basket in each of the three most populated rooms of your house.

This is the basket into which the mail gets tossed, or the odd screw that no one knows where it came from, or the cheap broken toy you intend to glue one of these days.

2. Spend fifteen minutes a week decluttering.

It’s not so much the piling up of things after a few days that becomes a problem, but letting things go for weeks. Purposely schedule a fifteen-minute period every week when you will put things away where they belong.

3. Keep receipts in an accordion file.

While they seem small and unobtrusive, dropping receipts on every surface of every room can lead to a mess. It also leads to frustration when you want to return something, and can’t find the receipt.

Get an accordion file with twelve sections, and label each section by month. When you get a receipt, put it in the appropriate section. The next year, recycle all the receipts from that month a year ago, and start over.

4. Don’t be in a hurry.

Clutter happens because we think we don’t have a spare minute to put something where it belongs. Realize that you do, relax, and take the time to put things back in their proper places as soon as you’re done using them. Which reminds me…

5. Have a place for everything.

When we first got married, my husband made me nuts the way he would just throw his wallet and keys and change wherever he happened to be standing when he remembered to clean out his pockets.

Finally, we found a wooden box that was perfect for the purpose. He quickly got into the habit of putting his pocket items there when he came home from work, and always knows where to find them when he leaves for work

Knowing that a bit of decluttering could actually improve your health, what tips would you add to declutter your home?