• I need HELP!!! I am currently the opposite of minimalism. I’m not as bad as a hoarder, but I have WAY TOO MUCH STUFF!!!! I have 3 children – ages 5,3,1 and a not very supportive husband. But I know that I want to simplify. The clutter is so stressful and time consuming. Problem is, I have no idea where to start, bc I have a hard time parting with stuff. And I love yard sales!!! This explains why my daughters have 35 pairs of shoes each, we have about 70 barbie dolls, 15 baby dolls, 125 pairs of underwear, 30 pairs of pants. We actually have enough clothing to not do laundry for 2.5 months. I constantly have at least 10 loads of laundry to be done at all times. 4 baskets of folded clothes hidden in a closet to be put away. It’s time to minimize. I wish I could hire out a helper. I usually go through my clothes and the kids clothes and toys twice a year. But it’s not enough! And our basement….it’s jam packed full of stuff!!!!! I need insight, advice, support!!!! Your blog has already proved inspirational to me. Thanks!

  • Wow! First, great that you recognize you want some change.
    Second, start slow and small. When you look too far ahead it gets overwhelming. Start with your own wardrobe and then work through the rest of your families. In the meantime, stop bringing new things into your home.
    Have a look through the archive here and feel free to email me if you ever need a pep talk. Also, if you’re not too shy, and want some serious encouragement, I love profiling families on the blog here. Let me know if you’re interested.
    Good luck! You can do it!

    • Sure! You can profile me…. I would love encouragement to help me get to where I want to be! I have drastically reduced my clothing (much of which is still sitting in trash bags in the basement….sigh)…but I still have tons of stuff that I can definitely do with out. There is tons of other clutter in my closet, though….like 50 pairs of shoes!!!! Ahhhhh!!!

      Thanks again! I’m looking forward to my journey…and most importantly the end result: more time to enjoy my family. 🙂

• Hi Rachel,

  I’m less far along than you in the decluttering/shedding process, but this is what’s working for me:
  1. Set aside a full morning or afternoon to go through one designated room/area. (Get spouse/babysitter to take child elsewhere.)
  2. Bring many garbage bags and boxes.
  3. Set aside any items that friends or family might want to take. Call them and say, “Hey! I’m thinking of getting rid of ___ and was wondering if you might want it. Call me. TODAY!”)
  4. Get the “out” pile out of the house immediately. No waiting. No hemming and hawing! Just OUT.

  It feels amazing.

  take care,
  Lisa
  http://semimaterialworld.wordpress.com

• With anything, I think it’s good to start small and work your way up. See if you can find 5 things you don’t need. Then 10. That kind of thing.

  Really, though, for me starting is the easy part. I de-clutter at least a few times a year. The problem for me is maintaining. I de-clutter one area, and feel accomplished and then call it a day. But returning to it, day in and day out, and covering all corners is harder for me. I am learning that I need to make reducing clutter into a lifestyle choice, instead of a three-times-a-year event.

  • I’m also starting to realize maintenance is more challenging for me than the initial declutter phase. Isn’t that what they say about diets? Easy to lose the weight but hard to maintain the loss. Trying to make it a daily thing to evaluate a small corner of our home and find something that can go.

• Thanks for the link love, Rachel!

  That’s a great idea you had for adapting my 21-Day Challenge to get rid of 3 clutter items a day. As one of my trials, I have getting rid of 1 clutter item per day, but your idea of 3 sounds much more interesting – and I love a good challenge!

  -Marnie

  • Really like the 21 day idea for a lot of things. Your water challenge was great. I’ve done something similar but it was cutting out my old nemesis: Diet Coke. I’m now maybe having one a week and we don’t keep it in the house. Next up: consistently making the bed. I am at 5 for 7 most weeks but I would like it to be 7 for 7.

• Yeah! Moving is a great time to evaluate what you need in your home.
  When we got our home show ready our storage locker was packed with stuff. We should have just got rid of all of it – our home was more enjoyable with out it – but instead we moved it with us. Sigh. Good for you for not making that mistake =)

• I am not (yet) a de-cluttering, minimalizing success story, but hope to be well on the road before the year is out, so all of this is very helpful. In my case, one strong motivation is the memory of my mother (who died three years ago) saying, “If I could do it all over again, I would have only a bare minimum.” I think she had a kind of Japanese image in mind–a home with mats instead of chairs, a teapot, a rice cooker, and not much more (not that Japanese homes aren’t cluttered–that was just the image). In fact, she wasn’t a terrible collector of things, and she was pretty organized, but she came from a certain generation, and she had her Doulton figurines, and her good china and silverware and table linens, she bought antiques, she kept old paperbacks, she travelled and bought items of interest en route. Some of her saving of stuff was sentimental, and some was frugal (which I respect and which I think does have its place from an environmental and financial perspective, as long as you’re really clear about what you’re doing–if you’ve kept it “just in case” for five years, there’s a problem!). Ironically, some of the “clutter” I need to deal with is leftover from her home. Which motivates me even more to keep only what I can really use, or what really has significance.

  • Thanks for commenting, Melissa. The sentiments from your mother really hit home for me. Thanks for sharing them here.

• Thanks for this post… I too started wit the easy/small stuff. My problem is a family that is resisting the streamlining and work that is hectic right now (will get better after April 1st). I’m in a bit of a lull, but this post is motivating me to tackle a small area in the evening.

  • You can tackle it in the spring cleaning window =)
    It’s like what I hear about any life change – don’t start it when you are in the middle of a very stressful time.

• Next year scrap the wrapping paper. Use your newspaper flyers to wrap your gifts; it can be fun and imaginative. We save our Saturday Globe and find pictures or words that suit the receiver of the gift. recycle after opening!

  • Love that idea. I am trying to slowly use those bags up as I thought it was wasteful to recycle them. We don’t get a newspaper or flyers but I think I can source some for next Christmas.
    Confession: I used to own a special box just for wrapping paper. Sigh. I recycled it in the fall.

• Any ideas for toy storage? My youngest daughter has lots of little toys/pieces (Pet Shop, princesses, fairies, etc) and I’ve tried sorting them into plastic shoe boxes, dumping them all in one big toy chest, a 3 drawer plastic “dresser”, baskets….but they don’t stay sorted because she plays with different categories together and I’m fine with that if she’d just pick them all back up. She’s 5 1/2 yrs old. She’ll pick up, but it takes forever because she makes a big mess and then gets distracted picking up & starts playing again. Now she’s lost her sister’s Nintendo DS in the mess (she shares a room with her 13 yr old sister). We’ve decluttered a lot already and she also has hand-me-downs from older sisters, but she honestly does play with everything she still has. I just can’t find a toy storage that works at all. Nothing worked for her older sisters either. It just seems so hard to find a toy storage system that will really work in our house. What does everyone else find that works?

  • I am maybe a bit extreme with my daughter (5 yo) — if I have to pick it up, it goes because she either isn’t ready for the responsibility or because she isn’t invested in it enough to bother. One reminder is enough to get her scrambling to make sure that she hasn’t left anything important out (and it all ends up being important).

    Of course there is a big personality element here. It does not work at all for my son (4 yo) — he will leave his very favorite play things strewn across the living room and I will remind him and he’ll look at me and say “I want it to go away, Mom.”

    Even if she really does play with all of them, could she be happy playing with 1/2 of them? If she picked out her favorite set(s), would she really miss the other sets after a week? Just because she will/does play with all of them doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t be just as happy with less — the quantity might even be somewhat overwhelming for her, hence the inability to stay on task to pick them up.

    I decided the toys and books had to fit into defined space before I decided what to keep or get rid of. I concentrated on finding what they really enjoyed, set those aside and then started pruning to get to my goal of 2 shelves for books and 2 shelves for toys (legos, blocks, puzzles, art supplies, and 2 bins of misc.). The exception were some larger toy cars and trucks that are played with daily that didn’t fit on the shelves at all and the lovies (a couple each) they sleep with. They don’t miss anything that left and we now have a very clear and visible line — if something comes in, something else must go out because if it doesn’t fit on the shelves, it doesn’t stay. We were having trouble with just keeping things functional; now, even at is worst — the great glue disaster of 2010 excepted — their room can be picked up in less than 10 minutes.

    • I like a’s rules!
      As Henry has no words yet it’s been easy to keep the toy stash in check. I’ll be doing something similar to a when he is older and more communicative.

  • Our big breakthrough at our house is we’ve started REALLY clearly labeling where things go. It occurred to us that we have to teach cleaning up skills as much as any other skill, and just saying “put your stuff away” was not teaching the kids successful skills. That said, majorly cutting down on toys helped too. It was a one-two punch at our house last month when my husband and I got tired of the unholy mess our kids were leaving everywhere (7-yo daughter, 4-yo son). Daughter was ok with putting things away if asked and stood over, son was defiant all around (we seem to hit contrary-ornery defiance at 4 in our house, 2yo’s are sweet not terrible–but the gloves come off at 4).

    So any toys on the floor that the grown-ups had to clean up were boxed up and put in the garage. A lot of my son’s toys went out into the garage. To get back a toy, he had to ask for it, by name (“Not I want my toys back” but “I want my dump truck, please”). We would go get the toy, with the condition that the toy had to be put away after he was done with it. If we had to pick up said toy, back out to the garage it would go. AT THE SAME TIME as the toy came out, we took the time to write the name of the toy on a piece of paper and took a picture of the toy with the name below it. Then we’d print out the photo, cover the front with clear tape to make a label, and then stuck the label on the shelf where the toy belonged. Then there was a very clear spot for the toy to go to, and in the beginning there were very few toys to put back, so it started out small and very clear for our son to get good at putting toys away.

    A month later, most of his toys have a clear spot where they belong when not being played with, and he has a much clearer idea of what is expected when we say, “put your toys away”. We’re still refining it (different containers for some toys, the box with small cars has a label on it but also needed a label on the shelf so it was clear where to put the box, etc), but are very happy with the results so far. And several toys have enjoyed a sudden revival in favorite status as they are easily found and the floor is so open and inviting to play on!

    As for the toys in the garage, about half were asked for back. We even let him go and look through the boxes when he asked nicely and explained “I can’t remember what’s out there anymore.” He hasn’t asked for anything (or to look) for a week or more, and I figure in another week I’ll have the time to drop the rest of it off at Goodwill.

    The family room with craft supplies is next up for organizing in a similar fashion. I love creative art, but man can it make a mess. And it’s frustrating to not find something you need for your current creation.

    A trick we have used for several years now is the “Trade Box”, where a few toys go if they aren’t being played with much. After a while if a kid complains that they are bored with all their current toys, we suggest getting out the “Trade Box”. The box comes out, but for every toy that comes out, a toy from their room has to go in (sometimes there is a bit of negotiation, like one really huge toy might be equal to some number of smaller toys). Every once in a long while my husband and I will open up the “Trade Box” after the kids are asleep and clean out the stuff that hasn’t been wanted in a while and/or is too old (for example infant toys with no infant in the house). The first time our son got to participate in the “Trade Box” he had the rules explained to him. He grinned and ran off to the toy room. He came back with his arms filled with his sister’s toys and exclaimed “I never play with these!” After dissolving into laughter, we clarified that he needed to bring some of HIS toys that he wasn’t playing with much. But otherwise we’ve liked how the system works, it helps refresh toys without purchasing new ones, and keeps less out at one time.

  • My youngest is 6; so I can almost picture the situation. Thankfully we have a playroom (the formal living room) where all the toys live except the lovies the children sleep with. The 6 year old’s bed is half covered in stuffed animals. 🙂 Otherwise, toys don’t live in bedrooms. They are allowed to bring toys in their rooms to play with every day. We have a quiet hour in the afternoon, and they sometimes bring toys and make a big mess. Every afternoon before getting to do fun stuff, bedrooms have to be cleaned up. So the messy rooms don’t last long. As messy as my 6 year old is, he does not like clutter. I once joked that since he was having a hard time keeping toys put away after taking them off shelves in the play room, we would move all the toys into his room. His eyes grew huge as he said he would NOT like that. If the children don’t clean up their messes, we give a warning to let them know we will be coming in to clean up and take the toys away to a time out-reserving the right to donate any toys WE don’t want to have to clean up again. We don’t threaten in a mean way. It is not a threat but a fact. The children actually like the place to be clean. They sleep well in their neat yet cozy rooms with books and their favorite stuffed animals, and a little wooden box of “treasures” on their dressers. When Christmas rolls around, they actually suggest that we need to make room on the shelves for the new.

    • I’m sorry, I meant to say that we found the best way for us to store toys in on simple bookshelves. Large toys sit on shelves, and we use Sterilite Show Off or their open top bins http://www.sterilite.com or baskets for little toys. The Show Offs have lids with handles that are nice for carrying to another room and carrying back to hopefully put away! 🙂 When the shelves are full, we have to get rid of toys before bringing in new ones. So I would lovingly help the little one learn to put her things away, and let her know if she doesn’t, that will let you know she doesn’t care about them. (She probably has her favorite toy in her bed with her, yes?) It is not fair to her older sis to live in the mess, and training her now will be doing a favor to all her future roommates as well as her!

• There are two things that helped me get started:

  1) Start small – I started with a goal to eliminate 75 items in 75 days – I ended that challenge with 1,150 items eliminated in 75 days instead! Just start somewhere. One item a day…

  2) Tell someone and have them hold you accountable. For me, since I am a blogger, I told the blog world and my readers that I was having this challenge and invited them to follow along. Each week, I posted my progress with an item eliminated tally. Every week I was held accountable because my readers were expecting a post! If you are not a blogger, pick a buddy to help keep you on track and check in with you.

  You can see my challenge here:
  http://www.whoislaura.com/category/organization-tips/tidy-up-thursday/75-in-75-challenge/

  Dr. Laura

  • Agree and agree. Blogging about reducing our stuff has helped with momentum and also given me some satisfaction. Nice to reflect back and see how much progress you have made.

• Just posted one… I have a few more that will be posted over the week. My favourite is the book that I recorded all the feeding and bodily functions my first born had for the first few weeks of her life. I did a close up of that! Boy have I got issues! 🙂

  • That made me laugh out loud.

• I have always been an ‘unconscious minimalist’, I never liked clutter and I am rather organised. However, I had the awful habit of holding onto useless things I received from relatives and the kids’ old toys.
  Over the past few weeks, I found myself on minimalist blogs and have been looking at images of minimalist homes, and it clicked! YES, I want to be a true minimalist! Thankfully my husband completely agrees with me, last week-end he took the kids away for a whole day and I went through the whole house, reorganised our cupboards, wardrobes, the kid’s room and took a bunch of toys and 10 other items that we do not use and need. (9 out of the 10 were gifts from relatives) Also, I gave away all our household cleaning products, and now only use vinegar, bicarbonate soda, Borax, lemon and essential oils. Once the toys and the other 10 tings are sod, we’ll truely feel minimalist, fresh and clean! 🙂

  • Well done!!

• Thanks so much for posting these tips. It’s hard to know where to start sometimes. I started my “de-clutter” last week with my corner lazy-susan cupboard–and only one shelf at a time. Each shelf took me about 20 minutes, and the results are so encouraging! Slow and steady will hopefully win this race for me.
  Love your blog and happy to be a new follower!

  • Thanks, Cherrill. Good luck!

• Did I really get a mention in your blog? If so, that is AWESOME! (If not, here’s me backing out of room with a red face :oops:)

  Well, I am working toward unloading another 2011 items from our home this year. So far, I’m a month in and am nearly at 1800. If you had asked any of my friends or family where those items might have come from, they would have been hard-pressed to find anything cluttering our home, but it was a sort of an invisible clutter hiding in bathroom, kitchen and bedroom drawers (like more than one of the same item, apparently lots more). The thing I like best about working towards a number is that there is some instant gratification when you get rid of a large number of items and the number goes up, I feel like I’m making great progress. If I’m feeling stuck, I just remind myself that tomorrow is a new day and I’ll have more opportunities then. A big part of this challenge is also minimizing what is coming into the house – I’ve not purchased anything other than food so far in 2011 (consumables).

  One of my best tips for getting started is think of how someone else might benefit from something that you aren’t using. We have a thrift shop close to our home whose proceeds benefit women in need, and it’s so much easier to part with great, useable items knowing that they are going to a great cause.

  • Yes, you did! If you ever want to share your story here drop me an email. I love hearing about how others discovered and embraced living with less.

• I’ve never been much of a hoarder, but I love getting rid of stuff I don’t use. I’ve not ever had too many problems with buying too much or not being able to let something go. But I like your blog, great inspiration and I’m so happy to see so many people understanding that it’s not ‘things’ that create happiness.

  Lately, someone gave me a great tip for figuring out which clothes you wear/don’t wear. Every time you wear something and put it back on its hanger, turn the hanger around to face outwards. Then set a limit for yourself, 30 days, 3 months, one season, whatever; and toss all the things which have hangers still facing in. Great idea, thanks to my friend KL!

  • Like that one. I heard something similar for kids clothes. If they are old enough, wait until they come to you saying they have nothing to wear. Everything left in the closet isn’t in use and can be donated.

• My declutter started with the “easy” things. I didn’t make a big deal about it, just started filling a bag with things I wasn’t using, and could easily part with. Soon, I was bringing a bag or two to Salvation Army each weekend, seemingly without effort. I also made an effort to just throw things out if they were beyond repair/help. At the same time I stopped bringing new things in. A few months later, my home was close to what I’d hoped for. I now set aside a day from time to time to sort through the more “difficult” areas and get rid of a box or so worth of stuff each time.

  • Nice. It does build momentum on it’s own once you start.

• The different tricks I’ve used to declutter are to work small areas. One day I only worked on shoes, the next was my hanging clothes, then the next was my dresser and then my jewelry cabinet. Had I tried to to all clothing/accessories in one day I would have been overwhelmed, but by doing it this way I was able to focus on those items really well for an hour or two, and I think I probably gave up more items because of that. I also try to make a goal for myself like “i/4 of my shoes need to go” or “12 pieces of clothing need to be donated” When you have a specific goal in mind it is easier for you to try to reach that specific number.

  Then, once you have the ball rolling, it’s easy to continue to other areas that may need some decluttering!

  • Thanks, Mercedes. I’m finding that we’re now in a slow phase. I have a pack ‘n’ play that we don’t use (donating it) and I put items in it as I deem them unneeded. This morning it was two workout t-shirts and a dri-fit long sleeve. Yesterday it was a home decor tray thing.

• I like the don’t over-think. That’s where a lot of people kill their momentum.
  Thanks about the photos. The after is even better now. Gave the canning supplies to my younger sister.

• I’m liking the whole Peter Walsh approach of creating a vision and only keeping what helps that vision come to life. It’s funny how decluttering is so emotional though. Sometimes I don’t even have the foggiest idea of why I’m hanging on to certain things. What we’re doing now is training our kids young…we’ve recently set limits on toys and things, and encouraged them to start thinking critically of their things. So far we’re doing great, without the fighting we used to have.

  • Must read some Peter Walsh!
    I just realized I still have my road bike shoes. The bike was sold almost two years ago and I haven’t been to a spin class in the same length of time. My vision so to speak is to keep running and taking Crossfit classes. I don’t see myself on a road bike until I have much older children (I have a commuter bike for casual riding). Yet, I still have those shoes.

• I am on the tail end of an 18 month journey to minimalize my home. I started with things that were easy to let go of, like Tupperware and broken crayons, and overtime worked my way through to the tougher stuff like a TV and pictures, and am still working on getting rid of some heirlooms. I feel happy. My 2300 sq ft home can be cleaned up in less than an hour (well except kids rooms) and I have space, lots of space. It does take time, and my best advice to others is patience. Work on it like an onion, just peel away a little at a time.

  • Like the onion analogy. I feel like I’m hitting another layer with what I can let go of. Which means I have a pack and play filled with things for donation.

• Struggling at the moment, I have started working through my sentimental hoard and it’s taking it’s toll. I’m going to have to put out a plea for help on my blog with photos of what I am battling against (will do later today). I am living proof that ‘stuff’ can weigh you down to the point of inertia. Really I should just chuck the lot, really I should, but I can’t. It’s currently beating me! I feel drained, it’s all out on the dining room table.

  • The sentimental stuff is hard. I didn’t have anything tied to someone no longer here – it was mostly around my rowing career. Can you actually do things with it? Someone suggested I put my medals on display in a shadow box. Haven’t started the project but it’s on my list.

    • Wait till you see the pictures….

      • Post them… I want to see!

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