Make De-Cluttering a Family Affair

By Cathy Elcik

If you’re ready to bring order to your hectic, cluttered life, don’t buy even a single drawer organizer before you learn the principles of organization.

Whether we’re searching every nook of our homes for a child’s missing shoe or we can’t seem to follow a schedule that gets everyone out the door in the morning, most of us dream of the day we’ll head an efficient, organized, clutter-free household.

Fortunately, being organized and clutter-free is a skill that any parent can learn.

“So many people start off with shame and feel like they’re somehow failures – that they should be able to do this,” says professional organizer Elizabeth Golding. “But it’s such a widespread problem.”

If you’re ready to bring order to your hectic, cluttered life, don’t buy even a single drawer organizer before you learn the principles of organization. Like a dieter who loses weight by keeping track of portion sizes and eating a balanced diet, you can’t help but get organized when you remember these two principles:

• Follow the mantra: A place for everything and everything in its place. Generally, a room becomes cluttered for one reason: There are no clearly designated places for your things. If you don’t have a system and you’re holding onto everything that comes through the door, it’s going to be difficult to stay neat.

“Have the things that you love around you, and the other stuff either you can get rid of or you can find an alternative place to store it,” Golding advises. “It’s a balancing act between allowing yourself to be sentimental and having some mementoes. There’s a difference between saying, I should keep something versus I want to keep something. You don’t have room or time to deal with the shoulds, so give yourself permission to get rid of those things.”

• Look at your house as a collection of zones.The two biggest principles of organizing are collecting like with like and then storing things in the room where they’ll be used, Golding says. “Look at an area of your house and ask what activities typically occur there. Whether it’s relaxing, watching TV or getting ready to get out the door, you have to create zones for that and then communicate them to your kids.” Remember, organization doesn’t happen overnight – it’s a process of changing the way you think about the stuff in your life.“Organization is a collection of new habits that have to be built up one small piece at a time,” the organizer notes. “When [the habits] become solid, like getting keys on the hook, you can add another thing. It’s like putting beads on a string; one at a time.