Clearing the clutter from your life also clears the chaos. Make room – make space. Out with the old and in with the new. Join Professional Home Organizer Linda Chu on “The Express” as she works with the Calamo family to get organized for the New Year.
The challenge for this family is making room for the new gifts that arrived over the holidays. They have to liberate some space. The other challenge is that three generations of the family share the multi-functional living area and it is being over-run with stuff. The children find it difficult to put their toys away when they are asked. In the end, they just shove stuff into the storage cabinets.
Linda Chu is a professional organizer and a master of creating space. She says that the new year is a natural time to tidy the house. The year-end is a time of rejuvenation. You have the time to reflect on the abundance of the past year. Then, you can look at what you have and decide what you want to take forward with you into the new year.
The Decluttering Process
Before you decide what stays and what goes, you have to see what you have. Do an inventory of your things. It is similar to grocery shopping. You don’t go to the store if you don’t look in the cupboards first. Likewise, you don’t buy containers until you know what you have. The next step is to purge. Take a hard hard look to see how useful an item is. You have to break the emotional attachment especially if storage space is limited. Keep the item if it still has a useful place in your home.
Linda also recommends putting everything in containers – be that cabinets, drawers, or boxes. The goal with this family is to make the storage cabinets more accessible for the children and make it easier for them to put their toys away.
Putting similar items together will make it easier to find everything. For example, keep all the books in one place and all the toys in one place. It saves running all over the house looking for things.
Watch Linda Chu on “The Express” video clip here.
Linda Chu and her team at Out of Chaos organize homes, offices, and anywhere that stuff gathers. Contact Linda to get organized for the new year.
