Making Space for Happiness

Decluttering your living quarters declutters your mind. Removing the physical clutter is the first step of removing our emotional baggage, toxic thoughts and emotions, and finding the joy of simple. Decluttering gives you room to breathe, your house feels more spacious, and you can keep it clean and tidy with a small fraction of the effort that you had to put in before. So you get your life back to enjoy it 🙂

Showcase 1 – My Kitchen Corner of Shame

I love to cook and I spend between 1 and 3 hours a day in the kitchen. As a working mom one of my priorities is to have a healthy home-made dinner at least 5 days a week and a “relatively” clean kitchen.  While I am lucky to have two pantries in my kitchen, the corner between one of the pantries and the refrigerator was always cluttered: floor sweepers, reusable grocery bags, aprons. I frequently ended up ignoring it since getting the meals ready always took precedence. Between prepping snacks and meals for the week, I rarely worried about what was in that corner. Until one day I found an unloaded bag of groceries hidden in the corner. It had probably stayed there for more than a week so I said to my self “Enough is enough”. I placed a hook on the wall for my aprons, I bought two self-adhesive broom holders and attached them to the fridge. All the reusable grocery bags ended up in a toy storage bin that I borrowed from my kids. You can see the difference for yourself. A simple and easy solution to make the corner not only clean and aesthetically pleasing but also easy to maintain it later. Because let’s face it – everyone can clean up their house once and make it look pretty for a day. The real art, however, lies in finding a simple solution that will allow you to keep your house in that state permanently with little effort even if you have kids and pets.

Showcase 2 – Closet Chaos

When the monster hiding in the closet gets out of control, this is what happens – chaos and disorganized clothes. Well, in my case, it is not the closet monster to blame but our busy lifestyle – washing clothes and just piling them up in the closet. So today, I decided that it is finally time to address the issue and dispel the procrastination closet monster by organizing the top shelf in one of our closets. I started by separating the clothes in groups – sweaters/workout tops/joggers. In the process, I found some ancient ones that I put away for donations. Then I put each group in a separate storage bin (the bins do not have to be very sturdy since they will not support much weight but rather serve as dividers) and voila! My heart is singing with joy after the decluttering and tidying up. And since I am a very process-oriented person – here is the process improvement that occurred during this exercise:

1. Decluttering
2. Clothes categorization and visibility
3. Easy access

It took me exactly half an hour to do this exercise. So stop procrastinating, face your closet monster, minimize your clutter and get organized!