Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Why your ”useful” clutter is making your space ”useless” | Clutterbug Podcast # 26

Episode Date: September 17, 2017

So many people hold onto items in their home that they never use because they feel the items are "useful" and can be used "someday".  What ususally happens is that so many items are kept "just in case", that the entire home becomes cluttered and unfunctional.  Let go of your unused items that can be used "tomorrow" to make room for the home you want today.  This podcast was sponsored by VideoBlocks.  Try your free 7 day trial at: http://videoblocks.com/clutter   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi and welcome back to the clutterbug podcast. Today we're going back to the basics. We're talking about clutter. We're talking about how to get rid of it, how to organize it once and for all, and how to really get over those sort of insecurities or anxieties we have about our clutter and letting it go. Today's podcast is brought to you by video blocks and I've been using this stock site for a while now to create really professional looking video clips and intros for my YouTube channel and ads on Facebook that really stand out you're going to get access to their huge library of studio quality stock for a fraction of the price and you can download you know HD footage and after effects and motion backgrounds if it moves it's on there you guys and it's such a great price for the whole year it's only 149 but you can try a seven-day trial right now going to video blocks dot com forward slash clutter if you're a blogger or a YouTuber or you just want to promote yourself

on social media but have it stand out and look really professional video blocks is the site for you okay so let's just jump right in talking about clutter yesterday i was at a friend's house my my best friend jess and we were tackling her craft room and i think a lot of people have a room like just's craft room so she moved into her home about a year and a half ago go and everything sort of that she didn't know where to go got piled into this room. I remember her being so excited when she bought this house, so excited because she was finally going to have a sewing room. She's a huge crafter and loves to sew and just, you know, create beautiful things. And this was one of the biggest selling features of this house was that she was going to have a space to do all

of these great things. Fast forward to a year and a half later and it's still piled with boxes and bags and I mean, it was waist high. Zero real organization going on in there. And the funny part is, in her mind, she felt like she was organized. She knew where everything was in there, or at least she thought she did, despite it being messy. And I cannot tell you how many clients have said the same thing to me. Yeah, I know this space looks really messy, but I know where everything is. And the truth is when we start digging through the piles and the boxes and the bags, they're like, oh, my goodness, I can't believe you found that, and I've been looking for that. Or in Jess's case, we found a lot of duplicates. So we found like 10 bottles of mod podge, you know, because she couldn't find it,

so she replaced them, and expensive shears to cut fabric. And just so many crafting tools or crafting supplies. We found in there that that she forgot she even had or had had to replace. So she had many, many duplicates of things that she used all the time. And her biggest reason for having so much in this room, and I hear this all the time as well, is I don't want to have to pay money to replace it. You know, the things that I'm holding on to are expensive or, you know, I might need them in the future. And the thought of getting rid of things when you have to replace those things, especially if you struggle financially, can really cause anxiety. For Jess, she's a bee. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, there is an online organizing test that you can take. It's free

to find out your organizing style. And I talked about it before, but there's four different styles. And Jess is a classic bee. So a bee likes to have a lot of supplies. They like to have, you know, every tool that they need, and they don't want to necessarily put those tools away until they're done whatever project they is that they're working on. So it tends to add to a lot of clutter. They also like to have all the tools. So a bee has a tendency to have even more excess than a regular bug. And on top of that, they see everything is useful. So just didn't want to get rid of anything because she saw it not only as the dollar amount that that would cost, but she also saw that as something that she would have to perhaps just pay to replace in the future.

So all of these useful things that she was having in this room were making her room useless. And I really had to stress that to her. She had so many useful things that she couldn't use her room. She could, her whole room was useless. And also, even though she saw it as saving money holding onto these things, because letting it go to her felt like she was letting go that money or she would have to spend money to replace it. The real truth was she, it was costing her money. She had to buy over and over so many things that she already owned because she couldn't find those things or get to those things that it was costing her money. And it wasn't until we took everything out of that room and

really went through and like opened up every bin. And she's like, I, you don't have to open that. I know what's in there. It's just fabric. And then we would open the bin and it would have, you know, bags shoved in there of paint and mage pod and, you know, sewing tools. And it was eye-opening. It was really eye-opening for her. So we sorted everything into the spare bedroom into piles. We made a huge mess. Sometimes you have to make a mess in order to get it better, in order to get it cleaner. So we sorted everything out and that's where we went on to the next step, which was organizing all of that thing. But during the sorting sort of process, as we were pulling things out of these boxes and pulling things out, I really asked her, do you need this?

Do you use this? Not is it useful? Because that, those are the two completely different things. And a bee and a butterfly really could benefit from having a friend with them when they're doing the purging and decluttering process because it's really hard for them not to look at an item and see it as what it could be or, you know, how much it costs instead of what it really is to them and their family. So we found a ton of stuff that she hadn't used in years. But she said, well, I could use it someday. I may use it someday. And it's still useful or it was expensive. And we really, I really had to drill home to her. Let's, let's not focus on the dollar amount of all these little items or what all of these items could be one day. And let's look at

the fact that all of these things are making it so you don't have the thing you really want, which is a beautiful craft room to actually use these supplies in, to actually create things. You are unable to use the space properly and have the thing that you want more than anything because you want to hold on to bags of fabric scraps and, you know, 10 open jars of modpodge and boxes and boxes of, you know, pipe cleaners and pom-poms. And, I mean, she basically had every craft supply, no demand in there. and she never would have had enough time to use all of them. But even more than that, because she had so much, she couldn't use any of them.

She really couldn't find the things that she used the most often and use the things that she uses most often because she didn't even have space to do it in. So she was a really prime and classic example of how your clutter takes from you and how you drowned in it. and these things that you put this value on are devaluing your home and are devaluing your time and the things that are priorities in your life. So I'm excited. We purged a ton of stuff and we made a pile that filled basically her entire living room. She got rid of more than I ever thought she would have. I was so proud of her and I think she felt really great at it. It definitely caused her anxiety in the

beginning like purging does for so many people. But at the end, And she started to see the results. She started to see the room that she has dreamed of for so many years coming together. So next time we're going to talk about organization. So I want you to stay tuned for that. We're going to talk about how we actually organize the space from scratch and the entire room's budget was less than $100. So it's not about spending money. I'm going to talk about some organizing tips that you can do using things you already

have in your home without spending any money, but there definitely are some secrets from taking it to just a jumbled mess where you really can't find anything, to being able to put your hands on everything you own in a minute. You should be able to say, okay, where is this? And be able to grab it in less than a minute. And that's exactly what we were able to do for Jess. And I'm going to show you how in a minute. I have to give another huge thank you to video blocks for sponsoring this podcast. I use of blocks to create amazing intros for my YouTube channel, Facebook ads, and just, you know, bring my videos to another level with B-roll. I'm telling you if you have a blog or a business where you're trying to promote your brand online or your YouTuber like me, you need video

blocks in your life. It has a huge, huge library of stock videos and intros and so many different really amazing things that you can use to bring your brand to the next level. So try it today. It's only 149 for the entire year, which is an amazing price for unlimited royalty-free downloads. That's videoblocks.com forward splash clutter. Try it today. So let's talk about organization. And let's talk about what I feel is the number one mistake that people make when they're trying to organize a cluttered space. This is a recipe for disaster. And I see this mistake all the time. And personally, I think this is a mistake, even if you have an already pretty organized space, I think this is a mistake that people make that makes it difficult to keep it organized. And what that mistake is,

is over organizing. Over organizing. I like to call microorganizing. So it's setting up little systems, sorting things into such microcategories, into such tiny little piles that first, of all it's extremely time-consuming. Second of all, it's really making it hard to keep up that organizing system in the future. So if you have a huge piles of pens and pencils and, you know, pencil crayons and everything all sort of jumbled together, and your whole space is pretty messy, your first step is not to pull out all the pencils and put them in a separate pile and pull out all the pens and put those in a separate pile. Instead, at first, you just want to put All writing tools, boom together and move on to the next thing.

I'm not saying that eventually you can't go back and micro-organize that pen bin, that you can't go back and put in little drawer dividers and have one for pencils and one for, you know, markers and one for pens and separate your red pens from your blue pens. You can do that. But that's the very last step, not the first step. And that's the mistake that people are making. they're making that the first step so just you know she was sorting some of her sewing boxes because we had to create her a little sewing area in her in her new craft room and she was literally sorting pushpins

she's sitting on the floor and she's sorting like the pushpins that have a ball on the end from the pushpins that don't and i see this all the time and that may be a really extreme example but I see people who think, oh, I have to organize my space, you know, get down on the floor and start making these tiny little piles of these really specific things. So in a bathroom, they'll have a pile just for like pain reliever and one just for allergy medication and one, you know, just for antacids. And the time that it's taking them to set up this system is really taking away from the time that they should be using for more practical organizations. So instead grab a bun and put all your medications in together. You can still find it quickly. You know, you need something. You know to look in the medication's bin, but it's easier to put it away too. You can just toss it back in when you're done.

And I know some of you really are thinking in your mind, that organization, are these really small, neat little compartments and everything really separated and everything really, you know, detailed and these small little categories. but that way of thinking, that way of over-organizing things, just makes it difficult to keep up that system. It's okay to let go a little bit and have a little bit of lazier systems because it just really makes it easier to maintain it. It honestly isn't that much more time to find what you need.

If you have a drawer filled with writing tools and you open it up, it's not that much longer to find the red pen in that sea of pens and pick it out and start using it. The time it would take you to sort all of that, you know, is taking away from the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is having a space where everything has a home. It's easy to find and it's easy to put away. It's not about having everything perfect in little segregated categories. So I wanted to cover that because, like I said, that is a mistake that Jess was really making in her space. And her room when we got to her craft room was with waist high, waist high of just bags filled with things all mixed together, totes. She did have

some totes that were, you know, organized in they were all of the same thing, but they were stacked along the walls and even in the middle there was just a path, waist high or higher. It wasn't a functional space. It wasn't a usable space. And because the things were so hard for her to find, What she happened to do, she would make a craft project, you know, in another room, the living room, because there wasn't space in the craft room. And she'd go to put it away and it would be so overwhelming to find the homes for all the little things that she had used that she would just put them all in a box or all in a bag and set the bag inside the room. And I see this all the time. People will take out supplies that they need, even if it's for cooking or even if it's, you know,

first aid supplies. If it's hard to put it back, people won't. So you've taken the time to really set up this really detailed system, you know, with all the band-aids in one little container and, you know, all the, you're polysborne in another little container and everything all separated. And you take it all out to use it. When you go to put it back, if you have to take the time to put everything back in these little tiny divided areas, you probably just won't. A better use of your time is to have one that's just first aid and you put everything back into the first aid bin. It's really hard to explain.

I hope I'm making myself clear, but it's definitely step one. And like I said, you can go back and you can micro-organize when you have more time, when your room is completely done, that's when you go back and you really, you know, up your game, up your organization game and go through and make things a little bit neater. But the first step is to macro-organize everything. And here's why this is so important. I guarantee you as you continue on through your home and you continue on through the, even the room that you're in, you're going to find more of the things that you've already macroorganized throughout the home.

And then you're going to, you know, have to put them, add them to your system that you, and it could throw everything off. The first step is always to organize into big categories. So let's use Jess's craft room as an example. we had bins for adhesive. So I had, I put all these laundry baskets, boxes, bins in the middle of the room. I took a sticky note and I made a label for adhesive. I made a label for wire entwine. I made a label for paint. I made a label for, you know, glitter. I made a label for punches and stamps. And then we went through all the piles. And if we came across paint, we tossed it in the paint bin. If we came across watercolor or oil or acrylic or, you know, we didn't take the time to stop and sort those different paints all into different paint categories, we just tossed everything in the paint bin.

When we came across glue or tape or Velcro, we didn't take the time to separate those all into different little categories. We put it all into the adhesive bin. This makes the sorting organizing process when you have a really messy space. base so fast. So fast. We were able to tackle the entire room in just a couple of hours, putting everything into these large categories. And once you have these large macro categories, you can go through then and subdivide a little bit once that the first part is done. Go back and do that little subdivide. But I think what you're going to find in most cases that those macro categories are good enough. And Jess was really surprised. She was like,

I'm not putting my tape in with the magepodge in with the, you know, ceramic glue in with the super glue. You can't put all those different glues and things together. But what she found when they were all together, that she didn't have to really give a lot of thought to where those things are. She didn't have to say, oh, where's my super glue again? She instantly knew it's in the adhesive bin. And it really only took a second to open up that bin, find what she needed, use it, and toss it back in without giving it a lot of thought and a lot of memory to where all of these things are. So that is the secret to success. Simplifying your system. Don't overcomplicate your

organizing system. It is a recipe for disaster. Simplify your systems, at least in the beginning. You don't have to be a perfectionist. Make as big of a category as you can. Let's just get it off the floor and get it into macro piles. That is always step one. And that is always the step that people skip. So I hope you enjoyed and thank you so much for listening and I will see you next time. Just one last thank you to video blocks for sponsoring this podcast. I want you to check them out today. go to www.w. Video Blocks, V-I-D-E-O-B-L-C-K-S dot com forward slash clutter and see the amazing video library for yourself. I use this so often for my YouTube channel and all of my social media marketing. I definitely recommend you giving it a try.