Declutter Your Home – Five Common Sources of Clutter

If you’ve lived in your home for more than five years chances are you can easily spot pockets of clutter and chaos in the nooks and crannies of your living space. It’s only natural for your things to accumulate at a mysterious rate and fill in any available closet and corner available. It takes a conscious effort to declutter your home. The first step is to identify exactly what constitutes clutter.

Paper clutter accounts for a huge portion of the useless debris in many homes. Unread mail, mail you intend to look at when you have more time, aging magazines, children’s schoolwork, newspapers and office paperwork account for a large part of the clutter in most homes. Unless you can adopt a habit of dealing with each piece of paper the first time you touch it by filing, responding or discarding, it will continue to take up residence on counter tops, in closets and in your filing system.

Let’s face it. We all have clothing we love but never wear. Sometimes it’s that special occasion dress you wore once but can never seem to find the right occasion to wear again. More often than not, it’s the clothing you wore when you were a few sizes smaller and you hope to finally wear again someday, just as soon as you have time to get back to that exercise and diet plan you know you need. Still other articles of clothing are of no current interest but you don’t discard them because they are still in good shape. It can come as quite a shock when people separate what they actually wear from what has been hanging in the closet for years.

Many people become an unpaid storage facility for other family members. Children leave for college or go out on their own and leave behind a load of former possessions they no longer use. They aren’t ready to let go but they don’t want or don’t have room to take them when they leave. Still others are storing a sofa for Aunt Matilda or a boat for Uncle George because they have room to spare.

Souvenirs come to us from many sources. It’s not just the memorabilia brought back from vacation that can clutter the home, although that can play a huge part in adding to the household miscellaneous stuff. Everyday shopping trips can result in bringing home bargains and great deals that were never on the shopping list in the first place. Unless an object has sentimental value or substantially beautifies the environment, anything that just sits there on the shelf or in the closet with no useful purpose is probably just more clutter.

All too often, you may spot something you fully intend to use, just not now. You think you’re planning ahead when you stock up on holiday wrapping paper a year in advance or when you buy far more of a household product than you can expect to use in a reasonable amount of time. Once you get it home you realize you have to find somewhere to store it for the next several months or years until you need it.

One of the problems with clutter is that it can be hard to identify exactly what it is. Sure, we all have a lot of good, useful stuff around the house. But, if at some point, all that stuff is taking up the space meant for human occupancy, we might just have to redefine the line of demarcation between what we need and use and what is simply clutter in our lives.

If you are overwhelmed with debris or want to declutter your home but can’t spare time, you possibly need a junk removal service. We’re here to help! Now is the perfect time to regain extra space in your home, and have it looking its best. See our services listings for more info.

About Jennifer Hanzlick

Clutter Trucker is a Denver-based hoarding clean-out company founded by Jennifer Hanzlick. Jennifer leveraged 15 years of corporate experience in to start the company in 2008. Her mission is to help and educate individuals and their loved ones who have hoarding disorder. A featured speaker at Ted X Boulder, Jennifer works directly with community and non-profit organizations to boost public awareness about the condition. To that end, she founded the Colorado Hoarding Task Force in 2015.