168 | Things Making Your Home Look Cluttered and What to Do with Them

[00:00:00] It’s not always the typical thing is in your home that are causing you to feel like there’s too much stuff. Sometimes there are other things causing clutter that are really making your home feel like it’s cluttered. Sometimes this small item is the decor or where you have decided to play something is making you feel like there is too much stuff. Like your home is full of clutter.

And we all know that being surrounded by it increases stress and anxiety and makes us irritable. You’re about to find out what might be adding to the clutter at your house. And what to do with these items instead of keeping them where they are right now.

 When you’ve committed, you’ve gone all in and you are on that journey to simplicity. And that means you want to remove the excess from your home. And it can be frustrating to put in effort to do the work to [00:02:00] declutter what’s inside of the cabinets or the closets. Only to realize that there are still rooms in your house that feel messy. You’ve been doing some of the work and you know that you are removing things from your home. It all feels really good. But when you sit down and you take a few minutes in your space, it still feels cluttered. It still has that heaviness of too much stuff. When you look around and you’re in your house.

The clutter might not be obvious at first, but when we’d spend the time to relocate even small items that have been in the same place, probably for years, you will immediately see the benefits you will be able to see. It’s a visual thing where you see that less brings you more peace and comfort, and it feels a better to remove some of that visual clutter.

you immediately get those benefits of how removing these things from your home, from these areas when they are out of sight removes the visual clutter. And it’s like an instant kind of refreshing feeling. Now I have the idea to make this episode because of things that keep coming up simple changes, simple, simply moving something from one spot to another.

Or taking something down and putting it in a different room is breaking. You buys this afresh a feeling of not being bogged down by all the stuff. And this keeps coming up over and over. So I was like, I need to do an episode on this. And I spent a couple of minutes. I jotted a couple things down, some notes to help me not forget all these things that keep popping into my brain.

When I was thinking about this topic, the list just kept coming and these are real life. Examples going to share them with you because these are suggestions I’ve made or things that my clients have figured out and will when they relocate or remove some of these things. Everything feels better.

And the [00:04:00] amounts of stress because we feel like there’s too much stuff around us and that there is this clutter. It goes down significantly. I’ll be combining some of the things into categories because this list could go on and I don’t want the episodes to get too lengthy. Let’s dive in right now and talk about what is causing some of this visual clutter that’s overstimulating to you at your house.

And what you can do with these things. If you still love them.

There’s a lot here I want to start with. Bookcases shelves, open shelving. If these things are over full they’re overfilled, then you feel stressed out. It’s too much stuff. depending on the size of the shelves, the amount of stuff and what feels good to you.

You are going to want to have a different amount of books or decor than someone else. don’t overstuff the bookcases sometimes just removing some of the books that by placed on top or at an angle, or when it’s mismatched. making it more aesthetically pleasing makes it so that there is some breathing room because everything is not all crammed in there. Also, if you have books on the bookcase and you have decor, that’s a great way to make it feel lighter, but you don’t want to over clutter, the situation that.

He goes in at two, the next thing you don’t want to have too many accessories and trinkets around. It’s easy to buy things here and there. And then a lot of times we just add in that seasonal decor, go ahead and opt to have fewer decor pieces, especially if they’re small, remove some of those.

if they need to come out a few times a year, put them out, but take away something that is there. When it is that off season or when it’s not the holiday decorations. Switch them out instead of just adding to it, those little things, especially when they’re small. When they’re small, you tend to have more and more [00:06:00] and more.

it makes it so that it feels incredibly cluttered.

if we want to take that and go on to think about other areas in your home where things tend to pile up or stack up. We would talk about surfaces, like. Kitchen tables. So for tables, coffee tables, kitchen counters, kitchen islands, things like that. Remove the extra stuff. If you have plenty of drawers, get the utensils off of your counter. You don’t need to have them on display. Put them someplace else.

Do you need to have knives in a knife block, or can you put them in a drawer or some place where they’re contained and out of sight? What about papers house? If you don’t use them all the time, you usually use ditch towels, put the paper towels under the sink or get one of those towel, the paper towel holders that mounts under the cabinet or behind a cabinet door.

So it’s out of sight. Removing those things, get those appliances off of the counter. If you do not use them, if it’s something you don’t use a couple of times a week. Relocate it, if the appliance is something that you only use a couple of times a year, Put it. In a cabinet, put it in a pantry, put it on a shelf in a closet someplace and bring it out when you need it. Don’t let it take up.

the space, the space is valuable on your counters. definitely don’t have it be something that is adding to that visual clutter when you don’t need to have it out. Those are simple thing is four spaces in your home for areas that collect clutter and then get the little trinkets and the decorative things off there. If you don’t love them. And if it’s just something that you put in that spot, because you thought you were decorating, or it was cute at one time.

Reevaluate those things. Can it go someplace else where it’s not adding to the clutter, your home should have breathing space? It shouldn’t be one thing after another, after another, after another. Open space or sometimes we call it dead space. That is good to have That white space where it is just a symbol.

Every little inch, shouldn’t [00:08:00] be filled up. We need to have that breathing room. when you have pictures all over the place that don’t make any sense. Be intentional with how you put your pictures. I, for one love to decorate with family photos and pictures that are important to me or people that are important in my life.

Make sure it’s aesthetically pleasing getting the same frame and having the frames hung. So that they are in line with each other level in order and having that same frame over and over again, with the same set, this picture is a beautiful way to display a family photos that doesn’t give off a clutter look or make a designated space for a gallery wall. If it’s in a hallway, it’s great to have pictures on one side of the wall and then leave the other side of the hallway, that other blank wall.

Leave it blank. So your eyes have a place to rest. So it’s not adding to that visual clutter. You want it to be a breath of fresh air, and you want people to look at these photos. You want to see the photos. The people mean a lot to you, the pictures, the memories, and when there are too many of them, you can’t see them all.

You don’t look at them because it’s simply too much. Same thing with going back to the tables. If you have a bunch of picture frames on the tables, Remove some of those put a few special ones out in one area and get rid of the rest because they collected us. There’s too many of them there. And it kind of makes you crazy because you don’t know what to look out. So that goes back to when we have too many accessories, too much stuff on the counters.

On the flat surfaces thing is like that. let’s talk about some of the things that we’re using, that haven’t been there for years, that aren’t just collecting dust. Thing is like projects and materials. If you or your kids are working on a project and they got some supplies out, the project is done or the project is ongoing. So you [00:10:00] have this pile of stuff. Pile of supplies.

Maybe a box or a container of supplies, but now it’s been there for weeks and it’s there week after week after week. Put the things back. Or create a space where these projects that are pending, this box of stuff can go where it’s out of sight. It’s not in the main area. If you have an extra bedroom or a closet that isn’t used a lot, you can put this kind of thing there. And then every time the project is getting worked on over a couple months or over this few weeks, then you go get the container and who’s ever using it, puts it back at the end.

When you start being mindful of these things and being intentional with the practice of spending a few seconds, collecting the items at the end of your work session, and then putting them away. It’s really only a few seconds here or there, but it adds to the piece and the overall clutter-free feeling of your home.

And it reduces that stress because it’s not in your sight where you’re thinking there’s another thing to put away. What a mess. It’s such a mess here. If you have a little bit of procrastinator tendencies, you won’t want to do that. But once you get in the habit of doing that, And it becomes the regular thing you do, then it’s not a big deal at all, because these are things that take less than a minute.

It’s just like the mail. When you get the mail, I’ve talked about this a lot. You go to your mailbox, get your mail, immediately walk to the trash and recycle cans. Sort through everything. Most of it is a recycle or a trash item. Anyway, keep what you need to and put it in a designated spot to address that day or that week. So you have this meal system that makes sense.

Don’t just stack it up or set it down anywhere. Other thing is that get left out can be laundry, especially if you are in the habit of taking your laundry out of the dryer and bringing it to a location to fold while [00:12:00] you sit in front of the TV or while something else is going on, you’re doing this in your living room.

Sometimes it doesn’t fully get folded or you just put it there, but you don’t have time to fold it. Change that habit up, create a laundry routine that works for your family The laundry that needs to be folded in the room is where you spend time. If you’re not going to get to it in the immediate future, other things that are temporary.

Are things like, flyers or coupons or things that you might use a magnet to put on the refrigerator or the side of a cabinet or something where you pin these up or you use a little clip, you clip them up. And before you know, it, those things are six months or a year expired, or it’s an invitation for a party that was.

Months and months ago. Clear those things off often, I like to have a designated small bulletin board or a magnet board somewhere that is pretty much out of sight, maybe in a back hallway or by. A door to your garage or somewhere, even in a mudroom or family command center area. And those go on the magnet strip or the bulletin board.

when the time comes that they have passed, then you remove them. You don’t need that information anymore. because I mentioned magnets. Magnets on a refrigerator are a huge cause of visual gutter. If you’ve ever talked to realtors, one of the things that they recommend when they’re listing a house is to remove certain things and make the house look large and open and refreshing.

getting all of the magnets and the extra stuff off of your refrigerator is a big thing because it’s so small, it takes a very little amount of time. You get them off of there. And all of the sudden it is a instant relief because there is less there. If you have a couple of things on there that are special to you and I really to meet a couple like two or three.

That or something that you use or something that you go to or that’s where you keep your dinner menu for the [00:14:00] next two weeks or a ongoing grocery list, because you’re a paper and pen person. If these things are going in that area, that’s fine, but it’s one, a pad of paper and one magnet. Maybe it goes on the side instead of the front.

Try this, if you’re struggling with this, because you’re a person that puts pictures and postcards and flyers and coupons and all these things all over your refrigerator and you have magnets all over it. And. You are thinking, well, I can’t do that. I’ve always had my refrigerator to say, remove those things.

Take them down commit to take them down for 30 days and then see how you feel. If you want to put them back after the 30 days, once you get used to living with that refrigerator, that’s not cluttered. You notice how it really is cluttered and how it makes you feel because it’s so overstimulating. The other thing that you don’t think of that is clutter is.

The cords and cables from electronics chargers left out. You can get little Bindi. Things, I’m not sure what they’re called, but they’ve been around the cords that you can get those little sticky things that sticks on one side. And then the cord goes through on the other side to get them out of the way. If you have chords from a lamp or.

Any type of electronics that you can see on the floor or piled up or tangled or in a mess. Try to get them out of site. Use those things that I just mentioned and get them out of sight. So you don’t see the tangles and the courts aren’t visible to you anymore. Those are just little things that add to the clutter because it’s something else. That’s there something else that is in your eyesight.

I want to go back to the countertop, the table situation. Don’t just think about your living space when we talk about clearing off the counters, also think about your bedroom, the nightstands, the top of the dressers. The bathroom counters, all flat areas like that, that tend to collect things. If you have things [00:16:00] on your table tops and on your dressers and on your bathroom counters, if they don’t have a place to go and a storage location, you need to organize those space, declutter those spaces and organize those areas so that everything has a place where it can be put back simply removing those things that you leave out.

On a regular basis is going to make your home a feel less cluttered.

another thing that stacks up are newspapers or magazines or junk mail, that kind of thing. I kind of addressed that. Talking about the mail, put them in the recycle immediately, or have a designated spot where they go one, a magazine holder, one, a basket that they go into. And if the basket or that magazine holder is full.

You needed to remove some of them and not just start a second stack. If you haven’t gotten to these things, especially catalogs. If there, six months ago, they arrived at your house in the mail, you put them in a pile to look at and you haven’t looked at them. Most things are no longer available recycle.

That catalog thing is like empty packaging or boxes that have come with. Shipments with all of these orders that we get delivered to our houses. Now break those down. Spend the few minutes. When you take the item out of the box, break it down and put it in the recycling again. If you let them stack up, it becomes a big job. If you break them down and take care of them, just like the mail from the very beginning that it’s not a big deal.

It’s just seconds. Each time. There’s other things in your house that will be left out like toys or items that maybe are mismatched. You can’t find a piece to something. So it’s staying out as a reminder, get in the habit of putting these things someplace else, because usually they stay out and then it’s never addressed.

If there are toys that are sitting out in your house that are being played with, come up with a storage solution. For those like baskets or cabinets where the kids that [00:18:00] are playing with the toys can easily put them back or only takes a couple minutes for the adults or the older kids to help put those things away, make a designated spot for them. So they have a place to go when they’re not being played with. And then they don’t get left out as often.

 Make sure you have a designated place for your shoes. If you are a family that the, that takes the shoes off. When you come into the house, remove the shoes and have a basket for those or a shoe container or a shoe rack where they go outside of the door or right inside the door. But don’t just let them be all over the hallway and entry area, because then all of a sudden their clutter, when they’re out of sight or they’re in their designated.

Spot. They don’t feel like clutter any longer. Those are some things that are adding to the clutter in your house that you’re probably not thinking about. If you think that there is more tackle these things, make your home a space that feels good to you, where you can relax and have time to unwind and enjoy the home that you live in.

Without clutter interfering and making it impossible for you to ever unwind and feel good and truly decompress. We want our homes to be a space where we feel good. They allow us to refresh and rejuvenate and be with our family and friends and enjoy things without thinking about all this stuff surrounding us and having that add to our stress and anxiety and making us feel irritable.

Good luck with all of your decluttering and organizing projects. I’ll meet you back here next week for the next episode of the intentional edit podcast.