Cleaning and Decluttering: Give Everything a Place

If the first lesson we learned was “you’ve got to be willing to let go“, the second was, “you’ve got to give everything a place”.

I watched a YouTube video last year, an office tour of a talented and popular videographer. He had an immaculate work space. Every lense, every tool, every backdrop had a specific place, filing system, or spot. His tools were even hung and outlined in marker – no possible confusion as to where anything went.

At the time, I thought it was a little extreme, but looking back on it now, in my less-full condo that is still somehow finding ways to clutter, I’m starting to get the appeal of hyper-organization.

Prior to this Downshift, giving each item a home seemed like such an un-homely way to keep a house. So lacking in creativity and comfort. But here’s this video of someone both highly creative and productive outlining the shape of his tools on the wall and talking about how his physical organization fosters his creativity.

So maybe hyper-organization doesn’t mean getting rid of the personality. Maybe clutter-less us will find more room for art. Maybe organized us will find old things we’d love to display (and actual SPACE to display it in).

And truly, we’re at our wits end. We’re done with cleaning all the time. I feel like my messy house is a reflection of my messy, tumultuous state of mind.

I read an article a few weeks ago on clutter and emotions – that we project all the crap going on in our lives into our homes. The article suggested that by cleaning the stuff – by actually cleaning, clearing, and organizing, we can start to clear away some of the emotional turmoil that created it. That the act of cleaning can be a physical action to attack the emotional stuff.

It was written by someone who works in personal organization, so they have a reason to want you to tackle your physical clutter, I guess. But it isn’t a foreign concept. Yoga is meant to do the same thing – to enact change on the most accessible layer first, the body, to begin to deal with the mind and the emotions and all the other layers that make us up.

But it was a third article that really brought me on board. For about a  month now, I’ve been reading http://www.trashisfortossers.com/. The blog is written by Lauren Singer. A few years ago she made the decision to stop producing waste, and, for the most part she’s done it (unless you count the single mason jar of small items she has not been able to reuse, repurpose, or recycle in the past TWO YEARS). She’s a true inspiration. Anyway, Treehugger did a feature on her a month ago – a photo tour of her house. Seeing her ridiculously clean, organized cupboards was the turning point for me. That was the kind of house I wanted. You can see the photo tour HERE.

Drawer Organization

I’m glad we did the big purge first. Now that I can see what we’re keeping, it’s easier for me to figure out what I need to create to store it all. We don’t want to buy a lot of stuff (that would kind of defeat the purpose of what is intended to be a year of downshifting and minimizing), though we did invest in some bamboo drawer sorters which have made a world of difference. I actually get a bit giddy opening our kitchen drawers now.  We’re adopting Lauren’s mason jar food sorting system and are aiming to buy more of our raw ingredients in bulk, too, so we can reduce our trash – but that’s a whole other story.

I still have a lot to do in the organization category – something I imagine will be an ongoing project that continues into next month as we tackle this first phase of our downshift. I’ll talk about some of our temporary storage space and the simple storage systems we’ve made in some rooms next week.

Later next week, I’ll talk about my favourite part so far – cleaning. Like, the actual grime removing part. We’ve been saving a lot of money and getting the chemicals out of every part of our house by switching to 10 basic ingredients that clean everything in the house. I’ll have that list up next Sunday.

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About the author

Drew Moore