I walked around the house today to see where the clutter was congregating in pathways and planned on picking one area that was causing the most issues. Pathway clutter is easily identified when you have to:
- Walk sideways to get through it
- Physically move the stuff out of the way
- Jump over it
One such area I chose to work on today was the upstairs hallway. I picked each individual item up and dealt with it straight away.
The upstairs landing is what I call a ‘clutter habit area’ that needs daily monitoring (I’m starting to think that I could write a whole book on this topic). It’s easy to dump things on the landing as it’s just outside the messy spare room and serves as a half-way house to where’s items are heading. A bit like the back door area that’s also under my daily monitoring watch.
It took around an hour to sort everything out, and some of it did go back in the spare room for reasons I won’t go into right now (that’s a blog for another day). I then gave the hallway and upstairs bedrooms a much needed hoover. It now looks like this…
Clutter Habit Areas
Items tend to congregate in my house for the following reasons:
- I haven’t made a decision about whether I’m keeping them or not
- I haven’t physically moved them out of the house
- I just don’t know where to put them
I think I will get better at this over time, particularly as I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of clutter books this week. These are ones that I’ve read and listened to before but I’m thankfully picking up different messages this time around.
How does the house feel now?
Calmer. The hallway landing is visible from the front door (if you look up). It felt much more open, airy and clean when I walked in from work this afternoon. My eldest daughter seemed happy too and commented on how different it looked upstairs. The decluttered area is quite near her bedroom and she shared her appreciation about what I’d done this morning.
We also need to get out of the habit of hanging wet towels on the bannisters as it’s causing the paint to peel, so I’ll have to rethink that one.
Until tomorrow…
Sandra
Sandra Madeira 
I have a friend that started every night going through the living areas of the house with a basket for each person in the house, collected everything by person and dumped it in their respective rooms. I will say that she was being pushed to her limits cleaning up after everyone. I refused to clean up my kids rooms after a certain age and if their laundry wasn’t where it was supposed to be on laundry day then it didn’t get washed or they learned how to do it themselves. It did help my friend identify who was adding to the mess and yes it was her sometimes.
Thank you, sounds like your friend had a very good idea. I’m realising that most of the stuff lying around is mine where I’ve put it there to deal with. I tend to leave the kids’ rooms to them and luckily for me it’s mostly staying in there.
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