New Year’s House Detox Plan!

January 12, 2021

One of our New Year’s resolutions is to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative and that includes disorder! There’s nothing positive about an over-abundance of stuff – unless it’s the valuable kind that will fetch a handsome price on eBay!! Tired of the detritus and disorder? Join the clean-up / clean-out movement for an orderly, uncluttered 2021!

Decluttering is Healthy

Did you know that living with too much stuff can be unhealthy? WebMD says that too much clutter can negatively affect your life! We’re not talking about a messy desk in your home office, or a bit of chaos after rearranging furniture. One study says that a messy room spurs creativity – but there is a downside – people who saw their homes as cluttered had high levels of the stress hormone cortisol – while others who saw their homes as organized and restful had lower levels.

And for those of us working from home in the age of COVID, here’s news you can use. Researchers found that being around disorganization makes it harder for your brain to focus. Some people who live in cluttered homes have a poorer “working memory,” according to research. Yet another reason to restore order to your space!

Go Load Up recommends deciding on and committing to a set amount of time – whether it’s 10 minutes every day, every other day, or one hour ever Saturday – to declutter. If you’re thinking, “that much?!”, your reaction might be the difference between organized and disorganized, focused and unfocused, peaceful or stressed!

Things to Get Rid of Now

Daily Mail, a UK publication and website, is not generally our go-to source for tips about home improvement or organization, but in this case one mom’s list of things to toss in the New Year is  useful. Among the top items to get rid of now, we can and did adopt several of these: 

Earrings and socks that don’t have a mate and haven’t for months should go first. If the MIA items haven’t turned up in a folded fitted sheet when you shook it out – they aren’t likely to. And the earrings? If precious metal – perhaps you can sell the item(s) to Gold Rush in Centennial. They’ve received 407 positive Google reviews and are only about 20 minutes from Crystal Valley.  

  • Old receipts, prescriptions, expired coupons and menus gotta go. If you’re checking your phone for takeout and snapping pics of receipts for taxes – you don’t need the paper versions anymore.
  • Shoe boxes should be tossed, too, unless you’re using them to organize your drawers. 
  • Unused gifts that can be regifted or donated aren’t doing anybody any good sitting in a closet. Give them to someone who can/will use them.
  • Dead batteries, broken crafts, broken toys, and broken jewelry are just this side of useless. Who are we kidding? No one is going to fix these sad little items and they take up space – unnecessarily! 
  • Expired spices and clothes that don’t fit – which we consider expired, too – should find a new home – now. You’ll never miss them.

HGTV offers a few more toss-now belongings in this list of 60 things to remove from your house. Things like last year’s holiday cards – yes, even the photo kind – unidentifiable frozen foods, formal wear and old glasses. Toss, donate or sell. 

Actionable Steps to Declutter Your Life

The flip side of decluttering is organizing and with these 13 actionable steps from Callie at But First Coffee, you’ll find it’s attainable and habitual. Callie says tackle small projects. For example don’t say, “Today I’m going to declutter the kitchen.” Pick a drawer, or a cabinet and tackle that – not everything in the room. She also agrees that it’s more of a life goal than a once a year task. Don’t look at decluttering as a project, Callie says, but as a mindset.

Andie at It’s Me Andie! and her partner William have a different approach – the KonMari Method. Watch her tackle 1243 items of clothing and whittle those down to a fraction of the total. She (via Marie Kondo’s book recommendations) gathered everything into one place and went through the items to find things she was “really stoked about,” getting rid of everything else. She said it was easier to do when she saw the mountain of stuff – and one of her faithful viewers said it was the most satisfying approach they’d seen by real people with real stuff. They’re fun to watch, too.

Clutter-Free and Clear-Headed in Southshore

Perhaps one of the best things about moving to one of the brand new homes  in the master-planned community of Southshore is the automatic tendency to declutter before you pack – then spreading out in new digs! Who wants to unpack more than is absolutely necessary?! If you don’t live here yet, isn’t it time to explore the options in from Taylor Morrison, Century Communities, Richmond American Homes or Toll Brothers? Life at the Lake looks like this – stunning ranch and two-story designs – priced between the $400s and the $700s.