Summer Is Approaching.... Clutter Control Time!

Clutter has been scientifically proven to raise stress levels. Follow these simple steps for a smarter, healthier and clutter-free home to help you feel more relaxed.

1.) Purge now:

Choose a room in your home and throw away, donate, and sell items that are not used or needed in that room. Each day, choose a different room. Before the week is up, you will have purged your entire home. Collect items in garage or one area to have a garage sale, or for items to be donated to your local area shelter, church or charity.

2.) Arm your family with storage options:

One of the biggest reasons home owners feel it is hard to keep clutter at bay is accessibility to storage options. Find a system that works for you and your family. Baskets for loose magazines, clear toy bins for kids, and labeled filing boxes for the home office.

3.) Teach your family to declutter:

When your children bring home arts and crafts, extra papers and miscellaneous clutter items. Ask them what they like the most, and file or cleverly eliminate what they don’t want. Older clutter items that may be taking real estate on kid’s desks and work tables can also be cleverly disposed of!

4.) Optimize vertical storage:

Instead of trying to use every square inch of your floor space, use vertical storage. Shelving, book shelves, and vertical storage solutions will help you gain more floor space and keep everything in plain eye sight. Use highest shelving for seldom used seasonal items, so you don’t have to climb a ladder or step stool often.

5.) Make it part of your schedule:

If every weekend for one hour you went through your home and looked for items that are no longer valid or used, this will keep down clutter tremendously. Magazine subscriptions, old newspapers, stacks of bills and mail are all items that should be filed or disposed of weekly

6.) Imagine how great you will feel:

Have you ever walked into a clean room and then right into a cluttered room? Even though you think it may not affect you, try living in the cluttered space for days and weeks at a time. You will find you are less productive, more irritable and less likely to want to spend meaningful time in the space. Try it.

7.) Make it fun:

Let’s face it, if organizing was more fun… oh how our homes would stay clutter free! Figure out what motivates you to declutter? Need incentives, new organization bins, file cabinets, or repainting the home office if you can keep your space decluttered? Make basket ball hoops over your kid’s laundry hamper… whatever works, right?!

8.) Know when to let go:

Often times, the source of clutter is our own inability to let go of the old and unnecessary. This is especially true with clothes, memorabilia, and family collections. Assess your reason for keeping, and be able to have a physical place for everything you keep. If the only place your items fit is in a brown box in the garage, you probably don’t need it.

9.) Every time you finish, put it away:

Parents especially are infamous for telling their kids to put things away after they play with them, but adults don’t always do the same. Your ability to put things back after you use them, will keep your home cleaner, and save you from procrastinating to the end of the week!

10.) Find productivity tools to help:

With the advanced technology era we live in today, there is some type of productivity tool to help you stay organized and therefore clutter free! From online resources to help you organize your papers to smart phone apps to help you organize your business, there is no excuse why you can’t have a clutter free home and life.
Your home doesn’t have to be a headache to get clutter free. Use these 10 tips to help you and your family figure out where to purge, clean, and organize for the future. Start small, or big – whichever keeps you going. If you get discouraged, go find a killer piece of furniture or electronic to motivate you! You’d be surprised how well you do, once there is a prize at the other end of the cluttered home hallway!

Freshome readers, we’d love to hear how you keep your home clutter free. Do you have good storage containers, or are you still trying to tackle your home clutter? Feel free to add on to our top 10 list below.

Wedding Budgeting & Knowing Where To Start

 There are a lot of new planners and experienced planners that struggle with knowing where to start when planning an wedding, I even struggle with this task.

Here Are 3 Tips To Help Pull Together An Effective Budget For Your Wedding: 

1. The most important place to start is what do you have to spend? This figure is often stretched by couples so a realistic approach is essential here. Then identify the crucial "cannot live without elements of the wedding" as each couple are different and have different visions for the day.

2. If the couple has chosen a venue, they would roughly gauge the cost for the hall and catering. Starting with the hall decorations because that's where most of the costs would go to. The rest of the things in the itinerary like the band, lighting, sound system, cake etc are the normal stuff that goes along with any other events. 

3. Have the couple each put together their own guest list, then compare those and make sure they agree on who they both absolutely want to have in attendance as opposed to who is "expected" to be invited because of parents' wishes, international relations or traditions. This is particularly important in "low budget" weddings as one can still produce a memorable and classy event. My point with that is to remind the couple that this is their day, not everyone else's opportunity for a party. It saddens me to see how many couples end up with hundreds of "strangers" at their wedding.