In our post title “Organizing Your Home – Can A List Help ^[2]?” we talked about creating a list so you can have on paper what you would like to see happen in a particular room. When organizing your home you need to create lists to help you
with the process of organizing.

As you start looking through your room it is important to take each and every item in that room, decide what to do with each item. Will you throw it out, pack it or maybe put it in a different place. One of the biggest challenges you will face as you are getting organized is to get rid of stuff that you don’t need. If you don’t have a use for it maybe you should consider donating it to a local charity or maybe it needs to be thrown away. Keep only the things in the house that you are actually going to use.

What happens if after carefully looking through everything you still can’t make your mind up what to do?

Ahh yes, doubting yourself as to whether it should be thrown out, given away, donated etc – What do you do? We came up with 6 important questions which will help you to decide what needs to be done. If making the decision regarding any item proves to be tough, it may help to ask yourself the following questions:

• Ask yourself when the last time that you used the item was. If you believe that it is more than two years or better still, if you don’t remember when you used it last, it is time that you got rid of it.

• Do you believe that you use the item? If so, how often do you use it? If you are not going to be using it that often but believe you will need it occasionally, you may not want to keep it in a place where everyday activities occur but store it in an easily accessible location.

• Do you have two identical items and if so, do you need both of them? If you don’t need them both, identify which one is the better working one and get rid of the other.

• If you are organizing the kitchen, do you have food items which have expired dates on them? If so, throw the expired food out. Similarly, old clothing can be given away and expired medicines thrown out.

• What would you do if you did not have the item in the house? Can you live without it?

• You should realistically assess how valuable the item is to you, both in terms of price and sentimental value. Are you keeping the item only because you would feel guilty getting rid of it? If the item is something you can put on display or use, keep it otherwise consider getting rid of it.

Hopefully by the end of this exercise ^[3], you have sorted out all the items in the room into just two groups – those which you need to keep and those which you need to get rid of. If you need to get rid of clutter, decide what could be useful to other people, donate them to your local charities. Anything left over throw it out. You may remember in one of our earlier posts we mentioned organizing your home would take some time and commitment, now you can see why so don’t give
up, we’ve only just begun.

^[4]