Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Want a home that’s easy to clean? Throw some crap out today! | Clutterbug Podcast # 107

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

How often are you decluttering? You might be shocked to hear that I declutter WEEKLY! Decluttering isn't a one-and-done task, it needs to be part of your regular routine. Maintaining a clutter-free and tidy home without a lot of effort is ALL about maintenance and routine. So what are you waiting for? Grab a garbage bag and throw some crap out today!       You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So many things in our life, whether it's decluttering, organizing, our health, fitness, relationships. It's all about the journey and never about the destination. I mean, because we're always on our way. Hey, clutterbugs and welcome back to the clutterbug podcast. I'm a little rusty. It's been a really long time. I mean, I've definitely done podcasts while I was gone. I was in New York for five months filming Hot Mess House, and I would try to do a podcast every now and then.

as you know it didn't happen very often but when it did I was literally like hiding in a corner somewhere in an Airbnb trying to make it quiet um working with like my phone audio it was bad so to be back in my actual office this is amazing I'm I really took my space for granted um I didn't bring any of my camera equipment and lights and all of that with me so I was trying to film YouTube videos in New York too with just like without all my stuff and it made it more challenging and a lot less fun so I'm sitting here at my desk with my my beautiful mic and I'm just like oh it feels good it feels so good but what I wanted to talk about was meet my homecoming I guess um from New York I got home two days ago and I was pleasantly surprised that the house was amazing and tidy I don't

know if I was like happy about that. I was happy, but I was also a little bit, um, resentful because taking care of the house was always my thing and the fact that my husband and kids could totally manage it without me at all felt a little bit. It bruised my ego slightly. Like maybe I'm not better at it than them or maybe they don't 100% need me. Obviously not. But I did notice that there were some areas of the house that were harder to maintain, harder to keep tidy. So my kids' bedrooms was the main example of this. And in my own bedroom, I bought a lot of clothes while I was in New York. So when I was trying to put them away, it was like I was shoving and I was really trying to graham things in. I'm like, this, I have too many clothes. I need to declutter. Which after I

decluttered my closet, I went to the kids rooms and I noticed they were having trouble putting things away in the bins. We had bought them new clothes for spring because kids grow and didn't declutter the old ones. So I also had, I wasn't here. So when school ended, I always declutter all the paperwork from the last year and put anything special in their memory bins. And I hadn't done that. So there was just extra stuff that wasn't fitting in the drawers, in the closet, in their clothing bins. And it was definitely making it harder for them. to clean the room. So even though the rooms were dusted and vacuum and their beds were made, there was like, it was bursting. You know what I mean? And it was, I found myself, I was only here

two days, but I was nagging. I was like, you guys, you have to pick up your room. And that's something that I didn't really have to say before. And I think the difference was it was effortless for them to pick up before because nothing was full. And I was feeling the same way in my bedroom. It was a pain to put away the clothes that I had brought home from New York because it was already full. It didn't take just a few seconds. It was effort. And when something's hard to put something away, we typically just don't. We just don't.

And when we do shove and hide and push and over-cram our spaces, when we need to get something out, and this is what was happening in my kids' rooms. When they needed a bathing suit, they had to dig and pull. And so they were spreading their clothes all over the floor looking from, from what they needed and Milo was spreading his toys all out looking for the toy that he wanted because every area was just a little overstuffed. So it took two hours yesterday and I was like, I'm going to do a light maintenance declutter and you guys, 10 bags, garbage bags full. Only two of them were garbage. Eight of them were donations of old clothes, stuffed animals that they were like, yeah, I don't even

need this anymore. Toys that they had outgrown. but the majority of it was clothing and two in completely stuffed garbage bags filled with trash and paper to be recycled most of it was like school things but kids also they're constantly doing artwork they're doodling they're drawing they're filling out pages in the journal and those journals get full and they're like actually I don't even want to keep this and this is the thing that I didn't understand when I first started my journey was that okay I I'm living with a lot of clutter. I declutter and then yay I like go off into the distance with this forever tidy organized home. That is not reality. And the truth is you're always bringing new

things into your homes. You always have to bring things out. And this isn't even about if you shop a lot. I mean, we're always buying new shampoo. We're always buying toothpaste. We're always getting new, I don't, I don't know, food at the store. If we're not getting. rid of the empties and the old at the same rate, things fill up really fast. Our kids, if you have kids, they grow so fast and they outgrow their clothing, but we also wear out clothing a lot. We wear out shoes. Or after holidays, we get new things, new toys. If we're not letting go of old at the same rate, our house becomes hard to manage. And that's, for me, that's really the cue of when I know that I need to do a declutter is when I'm finding myself annoyed that I have to tidy again.

When I'm finding myself like it's a pain as opposed to me just unconsciously doing it or I have to nag the kids to clean their room, we have too much. Anytime that I'm trying to put something away and I'm like, this is hard, we have too much. And I am far from a minimalist. You guys know I'm far from a minimalist. And I've done lots of things to make putting things away easier like lots of bins and baskets, open shelving, you know, I'm obsessed with calyx cube shelving from IKEA, because it does. It creates more storage. And the more storage you have, obviously, there's more room, there's more space that you've created in your home to be able to store a little bit more.

But at the end of the day, no organizing system is going to solve the problem of too much stuff, unfortunately. And it is about the maintenance. It's about the journey. It's about doing this on a regular basis. And so my family was with me for three months. So they were only here for two months without me. And in those two months, we got to a point where their rooms were hard to manage. In just two months of not decluttering, which got me thinking, like, how often am I decluttering? Like, I don't even know that I do it anymore. It's totally a subconscious thing. But I would say weekly, I'm going through the house and doing a quick 21 item toss. I'm always, always the night before garbage tonight. I'm going through and I go in the bathrooms and I take out any empty containers. I just do a quick path through of all of the bedrooms while I'm emptying the garbage cans

to see in the drawers. Maybe if there's some candy wrappers or extra trash because my kids are kind of pigs. And it isn't a big time consuming thing. It's literally under five minutes, but it's a regular maintenance thing. once a week to just do the trash bag tango as Peter Walsh would call it or garbage bag therapy to go through and just edit remove trash from my home remove things that I'm seeing that are obvious that don't need to stay in the house I'm doing this weekly and and I didn't even know that I was doing it until I came back after all of this time of it not having been done and man to take 10

garbage bags of things out of my house was crazy pants. But that, that's a normal maintenance level of things. I probably do remove a garbage bag a week of just random. Now it is not garbage. Sometimes it's a pair of shoes that the kids have a hole in or, you know, I don't know, random expired food, expired medications. It's all little things, but there's always stuff that's leaving my home because there's always new stuff coming in. So I guess my point of this podcast is, well, first of all, I miss you, but also because I did find it a little bit shocking. And I'm wondering how many of you listening at home aren't making decluttering part of your regular routine. And, you know, you do this big declutter, you do this big organization,

you do this big house tidy. But then two weeks a month from now, it starts feeling really out of control again and that could be defeating if you don't understand why you're like why would i do all this work just to have to do it all over again and so what i think is happening is we're doing it in batches right we're waiting till it's really really bad and then we have to work very very hard to get it back to where it was as opposed to regular maintenance and i'm definitely seeing this with my weight too i think i think you could probably see this with with every area of your life but with my weight it it's so hard to lose weight. It's much easier to maintain the weight that you're at with just a little bit of daily like put down the chocolate bar cast, choose a salad or a banana instead. Right. That's a lot easier

than letting it go for months of just eating whatever the heck I want and then having to work super super super super super hard to lose the weight. And I'm noticing the exact same thing with my house. it's really hard when you're coming from a place of clutter. You have to work very hard to get it down to a manageable amount. But let me tell you, it's easier than the weight thing, because you could spend like a weekend and see a huge impact. I could go to a weekend boot camp, and my butt will look the same. Just saying that, just saying.

The decluttering and organizing part, you see immediate results for the work that you're putting in. But I digress. The point is maintenance is easy. maintenance can become habit maintenance you can get to a point if you do it often enough that you don't even know that you're doing it and that is 100% what was going on in my house I didn't even realize I decluttered all the time until I wasn't here for two months to do it and it was sort of shocking how fast things had accumulated into my house and I wasn't even here to buy so like my husband is very cheap and buys nothing so we're not talking about like shopping problem level stuff we're just talking about life

accumulation, life. And I really want to challenge you to go through and just do an edit of your home today. Grab a trash bag, look in your kids' drawers, look in your drawer, look around your house, and edit and let things go. Open up your drawers. Open up your closets. Are there any shirts that you can donate today? One from here. One small thing from here. It all adds up to an easier life. Every time you let go, it's easier to maintain your home. It's less to think about, but it's definitely less to manage. It's less to pick up. It's easier to put away your laundry when your closet and drawers aren't stuffed. It's easier for your kids to put away their toys. If there's room in their toy storage, that they can just toss things away easily and don't

have to shove. It's easier to put your dishes away if you don't have to unstack and stack. if you can just open it up and quickly toss things away. And the way that you get that is by having less. So grab a garbage bag today, you guys. Feel motivated. I'm challenging you to let some things go from your home. You might be surprised. I was very surprised by the amount of bags that left our house.

But I was even more shocked by how fast it was to get all of that stuff out. We did my bedroom, Izzy, Abby, and Milo's bedroom. plus I did the hall pantry, plus I did the bathroom drawers, all of that in under two hours. Pretty amazing. You can do amazing things in your home too. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you're feeling inspired to throw some crap out today. I'll see you guys next time.