Five Tips for Decluttering.

Five Tips on how when and why to declutter. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Clutter is just unmade decisions. I'm Pauline Hoffman, Certified Professional Organizer.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

And I'm Rebecca Shear, Certified Professional Organizer. Today we're going to talk about five things that you need to consider when you're decluttering.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Yes, what are the five things, Rebecca?

SPEAKER_01 0:19

One of the things that I find the easiest to declutter, and I usually do it the very first time somebody says, Oh, I want to, you know, organize my kitchen.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

The first thing I hit is the fridge. It's got magnets. Oh, it's got magnets on it and paper hanging off of it.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

So true.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

I take all of that off, and in an instant you've lost half the clutter in your kitchen. The visual clutter. Yes. So I often kind of ask people, you know, you're buying fridge magnets, or you know, you bought some, oh, there's a stuffed animal that's uh an elephant over there. What's that for? kind of thing. And people keep saying to me, Oh, it's a trip that I went on. Oh, I went there, I went here. And I kind of I kind of say to myself, aren't the pictures enough? Yeah. Like, why do you have to bring something back? Yeah. What about just holding on to those memories in here, looking at your photos, developing your photos if you want? Yeah. That's a whole nother podcast. But like what is it that makes you think you've got to bring that one little thing back, those mementos?

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Yeah, so when when I think about that, Rebecca, I think about years ago when um when I was uh much younger, and I would go on trips, and trips weren't a big thing I did as a child. So it was a huge thing to go on a big trip, like you know, go to somewhere in the States for like a week and a half or go over to Europe or whatever the case may be. And so I remember those early on, it was hard to not bring home things. Well, and I think as a kid, as a kid, that's different. It is, but I wasn't a kid, I was, you know, in my twenties, right? So, but as I've evolved grown up, I don't know if that's the word or not, but you know, I've I've made it realize that you're right, the pictures are the big thing. But I always do like to bring home one thing. Do you? I do like to bring home one thing, but I don't bring home something for Ross, something for my kids, something we don't know.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

We don't either. I have a grandbaby now. Oh, the grandbaby might be breaking the tie, but it'll just be little, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

I promise. Yeah, mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

But there's a whole the there's a whole other podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

We can do that podcast. Okay, grandparents. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

So Pauline likes to bring home one little thing from a trip.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

So do you want to know what it is?

SPEAKER_01 2:56

It's consistent.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

What is it? It's a mug. Do you? And I know that shocks me. I know, I knew it would, and it may sound crazy, but I love my morning coffee. And I'll go to pull one, and today I pulled one down, and it was um Nashville, and it was a trip that I went on with Rebecca and Aaron. We were down there for a conference, and as soon as I pull it out and I'm filling up my coffee cup, I think oh, that was fun. And my sister gets keychains. So again, neither one of us are buying something big, but honestly, if I look at that mug, and I I pulled one out on the weekend, it said Los Angeles, so that was uh again an organizing thing that I went to when I was on the board and met all the girls there, and it was fun and I thought about it, but it's just just mugs. I don't bring home anything else. How many mugs do you have? I have a lot. Okay, well, we're gonna go with that. Um but let's be honest, though, I can cycle through them all within a week to two weeks if I wanted to.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

So a lot is a little different from your perspective to someone else's.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

That's right. And I do make sure I use them all. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Okay. So there's a there is definitely a a tip. If you're using your mementos, that is a great thing. But if they're in a chest somewhere, yeah, and they're just boxed up and out of out of sight. Not a good idea. I don't know. Think about it, right? Like, I mean, the next time you're on a trip, the next time you go somewhere, yeah, get an ice cream cone instead of a keychain. And send a picture to Rebecca and I. There you go, and send a picture to us, and we'll feel so much better about ourselves. And we'll keep it. There you go. And so now the next thing that I think about when um you need to really discuss and really hit hard when you're decluttering your home are candles.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

You know, that's a big one for people. Um if you enjoy burning candles, and so I have candles that I burn inside, and I have candles that I burn outside, and I do enjoy burning candles, but they can be a commodity that we you like to buy.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Like you think it's almost like a privileged thing, you know, like you've got a little extra money, and so you buy the$12 candle or the$24 candle.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Well, and it's pretty and it smells nice, and the good thing is, is candles are consumable. And so when I am shopping for gifts nowadays, I would say 80% of my gifts are consumable, which is lovely.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

I I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, because I am somebody who's like, if you if I can use it and get rid of it, yeah, then I've I've given it the love. Yeah, and out the door it went. Exactly. Now I have candles at my house. People give me candles as gifts, and I wonder, what do you do when your candle gets down to the very bottom and it's got like the three little wicks, but there's a little bit of wax down there. Do you clean it all out and recycle the glass?

SPEAKER_00 6:08

So I do. There I the odd time I will keep one if it's a specific side that I can put a votive in. Oh yeah. But I don't like to keep too many of them because you don't use them. I mean, I can't use 10 vote holders in one evening. I just can't. Yeah, the house is like you'd have the house burning down.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

And then there's the people, the lovely, gorgeous people, that we come into their homes and they say, I want to get rid of the sideboard. And so we open up the sideboard to go through it and ask keep or go, keep or go. And there will be drawers of full of candles, still wrapped in cellophane.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Yeah, so so my thought process there is it's either you know something they were buying at one time and now don't burn candles anymore, or they've been given gifts and just don't think about getting them out, or maybe right now they're going through the the little toddler stage and they don't want them out. There's can be various different reasons why we end up with them. Um, but to go back to your thing about the um the little piece in the bottom, some people put that all in a jar and then they'll make a candle, which is kind of cool. We have heard about that too, yes. But the other thing is are like donate them if you're not gonna use them, or maybe you got a scent that you thought you'd really love. That's happened to me a few times, and then I I burn the tea light and I go, This isn't working for me. So I either give them to a friend or donate them because why keep them? Because they do start to go funny after a while.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Now, when we go back to the tapered, still in the plastic candles, I find that it is from a certain generation, not not there's no shaming going on, but there's a certain generation, my mom and dad's generation, that they kept those candles and they were in cellophane and they used them in centerpieces or in candle holders at Christmas.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

I hate to say they never burned them, yeah. No, I was one of those because I'm just that much older than you. Not a lot, just a little, just a little. Um, and I I did like I know I remember um when we first got married on my buffet, I had them sitting up there and they look beautiful. Never burned, never burned, but if they sit in there too long, what we've discovered is they start to bend. Yes, doesn't it? And they disc and the color comes out of them, especially the dark ones, like the red ones and stuff. Yes, yeah, yeah. So I'm saying burn the candle, baby. Yeah, burn it, burn it, have some fun and joy. We're almost patio season. Take them outside. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Yeah, burn those candles. So another thing that I think you need to look at when you're doing your decluttering is I think that one of the things is that we have these seasons, uh, these celebratory seasons. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, um, we've got Canada Day, we've got St.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Patrick's Day, we've got Hanukkah, we've got Ramadan. We have all these holidays.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

All tons of holidays. And do you find, I find, and this is me, I'm a professional organizer, that especially I find Easter hard and Christmas hard. Because at Easter, well, because we're coming out of winter, and they have beautiful, they have beautiful displays in stores, and they're cute, and they're bright, and they're cheerful, and I want my whole house to be cheerful because it's been a long winter. So I find it hard not to buy that cute little bunny right there. But I I hold back because you know what? If you do that every year, you're gonna end up with a lot of bunnies. It's true. They're gonna populate, and you don't want to populate bunnies. I've been there. Not good. So that would be a question that I think you would need to do when you're decluttering is when you pull out your tote of seasonal decor, and you know, maybe you only have two or three decorations for Easter, you're good. Yeah, but if you have four totes of it at Easter, that's the time to purge. Because if it doesn't for Easter. Well, it is, it is, but if it doesn't go out and out on display for your decor, don't eat it.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Mary. It's true. Same with Christmas. But Rebecca, what if they're the type of people who really like say that maybe they're a big family, they have a lot of people come home and they love to get like everything decorated nicely.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

The key question is, are you using it right? That's right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

It can be in your tote. Okay, you can pull it out, you can decorate your whole living room, and the only thing left in a tote in the tote is a throw pillow that you don't want out anymore, you don't really like it, or it's got a stain on it. There you go. You just donated one thing. There you go. Yeah. The question is, is can you not buy another one?

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Well, I might need something different, or you might not. Or I might not. Yes. So I know I like to when I put my stuff out, I al I quite often question, like, do I really want this anymore? Is this what I want? Big time at Christmas. I do it big time at Christmas. And these last couple years, I have really, you know, gotten rid of some stuff. And the reason it's good to do it when you bring it out is when you take it to the donation stores, like the end of November, the first part of December, they can they can use it and they can get it out on the floor, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:29

It is a great time to declutter Christmas decorations right before Christmas. Whatever you don't put out in your space, you obviously don't feel the love for it. And that's okay. You don't have to feel the love for things all the time.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

It's really sometimes you can be guilted into putting something up.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

You know, it's true. If you've got something that came maybe from mom or dad or mother-in-law or father-in-law, or whatever the case may be, um, sometimes we think, yeah, I gotta put that out because you know, yeah. And and that's okay. If that makes someone in the home feel good and you're good with it, that's okay. But you know, if you have it and it doesn't make you feel good and nobody else is concerned about it, it's time to move it on. Exactly. It's kind of like the clothes.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

Yeah. You put on an outfit, you look good, you gotta feel that same when you walk into your space. Whether it's decorated, whether it's dedecorated, whether it's decluttered, yeah. You gotta feel great about walking into that space. When you open the door, there can't be any more weight, which is visual clutter on your shoulders.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Now it's funny you say that about walking into the room and going. So I have a living room off of my kitchen um that is kind of tricky to place furniture.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

A little bit.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Yeah. So whenever I talk to it about my friends and different friends, everybody's going, yeah, that's really the only place you can put the couch. Yeah, that's really the only place. Well, at Christmas, I took down all my Christmas decorations, did the big purge with everything that was in the room, cleaned the room really well, scrubbed the floors, you know, did the whole thing. I was I must have been feeling pretty ambitious that it was good, it was good, and then I had the furniture kind of there, here, there, and everywhere. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna put the couch in front of the window. I'm not a big fan of that, but I did, and I love it. There you go. Everybody that's walked in has gone, wait a minute, you changed the room, and then I asked them how they like it. And most people are saying it looks just a little bit more open, a little bit more airy, a little bit bigger.

unknown 13:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

So there's nothing wrong with moving stuff around. There's nothing wrong with moving stuff around if you can. So then the next morning I got up and I did that, which she just did.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

The oh I know. I actually built um an a garage attached to the house. Yeah, and I had a laundry room and a mud room installed between the garage and the house. Great idea. I get up in the morning, I go and I walk, I go to my laundry room, I just sit there. Oh, this is nice. This is nice. Because my laundry room used to be in the cellar, so just having it up on one floor.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

But having a cellar. Yes. Okay, now for you people who have maybe always lived in a home that had a basement. Yes, no, a cellar is like dirt floor, dirt floor, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

So my base, my little farmhouse laundry was in the cellar. So when it got moved up to the main floor, that was my oh place. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, so if you can get that in every room of your house, yeah, you're winning.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Or even 80% of them, you know. Let's let's not bite off more than we can chew, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:47

I mean, you're still living with children and a spouse. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah, I'm not.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

I'm not.

unknown 14:54

No.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

So the other thing that I wanted to think that one of the tips that I think we should talk about for decluttering your house home is the bulk buying. Oh, yeah, that can be a problem, especially with Costco.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Costco's a tough one. Big box stores. Yeah. Um, there's places that we order from and they'll go, oh, you just need two more$20 more dollars and shipping's free, which which is good. And if you're gonna use it, that's fine. But are you?

SPEAKER_01 15:27

But are you are you gonna use it in like two months, or is it gonna take you three years to use all that scotch tape?

SPEAKER_00 15:34

It's true, it's true. Like I was out with my sister the other day, and um, she was talking about double AA batteries and the price of them and stuff, and they can be really expensive depending on where you pick them up. And I said, Oh, I always buy my double A at Costco, but I buy them at Costco because I've got four labelers to outfit, and I've got a lot of other things around the house that have batteries. Ross has stuff in his garage, so on and so forth. She goes, Yeah, I I I maybe buy a package once or twice a year.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

And she says, I changed the clocks and I had a couple that needed them, and so she only needed two, so she only bought two, which is so interesting because I I wish I was like that, but I do find that for things that I know I have the space that I can store it, it's very hard, very hard to walk away what we perceive as a deal. But when we buy those 24 rolls of scotch tape, what's the deal? Like they might be less financially, but they're taking up more space. Well, I'm and what value do we put on space? A lot of value, not enough, not enough.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

No, it's true. We don't because I think that's why we're always decluttering, because we we run out of space and we run out of space and we don't realize how important it is to us to have it. But when you think about it, if you buy 24 rolls of scotch tape, if you don't have children at home that are doing crafts and stuff, chances of you going through any more than two a year agreed. So are those gonna sit there for 12 years? Exactly. And so that money could have been used somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

So even though per tape roll it's cheaper to buy bulk, you've got to think the 24 rolls, let's just say they were$24. Yeah. Whereas you just buy two rolls of tape for let's say five bucks. Yeah, and you're not using up the space in a craft drawer, in a in a space in an area where you have your gift wrap and things like that. You're just you got two rolls, that's it. That's right. It's not an overabundance because what I find is we get to clients that are downsizing, yeah, and that stuff all goes to donation, anyways.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah, we we end up sending a lot to donation, and yes, it like gift bags and tissue. Yeah, that yeah, there's certain things that just seem to be gift bags are a big one. Instead of grabbing another one at the dollar store, check and see what you have at home. Yes. Or what I tend to do and say to my friends too, is buy generic gift bags. You know, just nice colors, not pink and red, or curse or whatever the case may be. Because then if I have a baby gift, it just needs to be a pretty bag. That's all it needs to be. Agreed, that's a really good idea. So, and then I only ever buy white tissue paper because then it just goes with anything, right? Right? I don't buy the color for it. Now, if you're someone who loves to rap, and that then that's your thing. We all have our thing that brings us joy. That's okay. We're not telling you not to do this stuff. That's right, because if it makes you happy, but we all we all live differently, and I think the other thing that we sometimes forget is we just think we need. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

I agree, or we do what the person that's shopping with us does, right? You you know what? I have had friends that say to me, I love shopping with you. And I'm like, why? What's the big deal? Me too. I literally will pick up a t-shirt and you look at me like this. Not that it's not a pretty looking t-shirt or anything like that. She goes, as soon as you look at me, I go, I don't need this, and I put it back. And I and I tend to do that when I'm shopping myself too. But Pauline made a very good point. If you love to wrap gifts and you love to make things pretty like that, and that's who you are, and people expect it then, and yes, then do that. Yeah, you know, buy the 24 rolls of tape if you're going through it, buy it. Absolutely. We're not here to change who you are as a person. No, we're here to help you understand what bulk buying might be taking from your life in that space, and just to kind of think of the things we do get consumed in consumerism.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Um, so my husband and I still watch TV, like as in the channels that come in, right? Yes, and I know a lot of younger people don't, right? But we do, and um because it works for him, and you gotta keep it simple, right? Um, but some of the commercials that have come on, like we'll look at each other. Do people like actually buy that stuff?

SPEAKER_01 20:28

You know, and I think we get sucked into it too much at different stages of your life, it's even worse. Sure, it is, and you know what? We'll probably talk about that in a podcast coming up, but for now, that's decluttering, just unmade decisions. It is. Have a great day, we'll see you again.