Hanging On To Stuff

We tend to hang on to too much stuff, don’t we?

Here it is friends. That extra blog I promised last Wednesday. Thank you so much for following along. I’ve been working extra hard this week learning everything I need to know about owning a website and publishing products and email service providers. This blogging thing is it’s own little world and newbies like me can tend to get lost and overwhelmed, if I let it. One day at a time. Bit by bit.

The same can be said about housekeeping, especially if you have a full time job and / or small children or an active life in general. Who has time to keep house? Am I right?

It’s all about priorities. Now you may not think that keeping up with housecleaning is all that important. In the big picture, the big scheme of things, it’s not. But I will tell you that having a clean home and one that looks somewhat organized will do wonders for your stress level. A messy house can make you feel like life, in general, is out of control.

People today have too much on their plates and too much in their homes! Keeping a tidy house is just like any other habit. It takes discipline. It takes writing tasks down in your planner every day. Making time for it. (If you are having a hard time finding time, you need to check out the blog on punctuality. There’s a worksheet in there to help keep track of your time.)

So Let’s Get Started…

I like to say “If you haven’t touched it in two years, get rid of it.” Seriously, unless it is something of sentimental value–reuse, recycle, regift, lol. –Repurpose. That was the word I was looking for. (This may be hard to do, especially if your spouse likes hanging on to stuff, but you just have to try.)

I am going use myself here as an example to help you see that you are not alone. In my office/sewing room, I have over 250 spools of different colored sewing thread hanging on my walls! Really? I just counted them. You might ask why I have so much? Well, I used to have a home sewing business. But that ended more than 2 years ago. Do I still need 250+ spools of thread? NO! So,why do I still have it? (Well, you never know when you might have to mend a hole in a shirt and you want to have the right color, is my excuse. Or, I still sew quilts for the grandkids. But, truth be told, I still purchase thread to match the colors of the quilt fabrics.) Ridiculous! As I type this, I am laughing at myself.

We’ve been hanging on to stuff in the attic—kids toys and furniture. We should have just found this stuff another home. We didn’t need it and our kids didn’t want it when they “grew up” like we thought they would. Go figure.

Why do we feel the need to hang on to everything? Are we trying to justify the money we spent on it in the beginning? Our parents and grandparents would say that they lived through the depression and you never threw anything away. That was because they didn’t have anything. Well, we have way more stuff than we would ever need in our lifetimes. We just need to stop buying! –But that’s another blog.

Spring is just about here and with it usually comes the urge to purge. So I encourage you to stop hanging on to stuff and let it go as that one Disney song suggests. To help you with keeping the house in great shape, I am sharing my clean everything checklist. It’s hung on my fridge as my reminder, helping to keep me on track.

Just like everything else. Schedule it in your planner. Make time. If you do the daily tasks, that’s half the battle.

God bless–Barb