Living a Clutter Free Life. Part 1

I am not a clutter bug, well not really. I am not as clean as DH, but I am most definitely cleaner than your average bear. I'm not saying this because I want a big fat pat on the back, I'm saying this because I have a lot of people who ask how I do it. What are my methods for decluttering if there is clutter and for keeping the clutter down in the first place. I've written on this before, a few years ago, but I figure it never hurts to revisit something useful. So here it is. The start of my short series called Living a Clutter Free life.

Today I am going to start with a basic, something that is so basic that sometimes people forget to do it. Figure out how much space you have! It sounds simple, but so many people forget to do this. No matter how organized you want to be, you cannot organize into a place that you have too much stuff for. It's the problem of too much stuff in too little space that causes the piles of overflowing things in the wrong rooms.

So before you start to buy your fun little organization totes, or print off all of the nifty labels you see on pinterest you need to see how much room you are working with. Say you are organizing your pantry. Look at the number of shelves you have, How tall are they? How Deep? What will you be storing in there? Once you have an idea of what you are working with you will have an idea of what is a realistic goal.

As you can see, this pantry is a place for food, toiletries, appliances and other cooking supplies, as well as some random toiletries. They have long, fixed shelves that are not very deep. They have too many things for the space that they have, or they have the things stored incorrectly.

So the first step is to step back and look at the space that you have to store things in. It's fixed, so that is what you have to work with.