Is your house always a mess?

Chances are you have a clutter problem.

A cluttered home makes us feel out of control, doesn’t it?

You might start blaming yourself for not having your act together. You could start thinking something is wrong with you. Maybe you’re just a messy person. Maybe you’re lazy. Maybe you belong on a reality TV show.

But what if you are just normal people with a few legitimate reasons for the state of your home?

Once you understand why the clutter occurs, the solutions might be easier to solve than you think.

How much of the living area in your home is cluttered with possessions?

Consider the amount of clutter in your kitchen, living room, dining room, hallways, bedrooms, bathrooms, and other rooms.

Kick Your Clutter Habit

It’s easy to get attached to things, either because you've had them for a long time, they have some special meaning to you.

When you're looking to downsize and declutter, you have to try and separate yourself from those feelings a bit.

Ask yourself "What does this item do for me that nothing else does?"

Start thinking about the utility of the item you're looking at.

What makes it unique among your possessions?

What does it do?

Does it do multiple things or is it a unitasker?

Next, ask "Do I have anything else that does this better, or at least does something else as well?

This is where you choose between you can opener and the other can opener with a bottle opener on the top. Pick the items that add more value to your life.

Finally, ask "Does this have sentimental meaning to me?"

When it comes to appliances, tools, and electronics, it's easy to ask the first two questions, but if you're looking at a box of photos, utility doesn't come to mind.

Sentimental value is important in a lot of things, so don't overlook it, just try not to get bogged down in how an item makes you feel versus what it does for you and how much space it takes.

Apply these three questions to virtually everything you own.

You have a natural reason to evaluate everything you possess, but if you're decluttering to clean and organize, make sure to give yourself time to review everything, instead of just deciding that specific drawer or box is fine the way it is.

Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.  

Thank you …Use the Four Box Method

• Four box method is just a modified version of keep/donate/toss. Instead of three boxes, you'll make four: Keep, Sell/Donate, Store, and Trash.
• Keep are items you need or use regularly, and have space for.
• Sell/Donate will go to Goodwill or your favourite charity, or hopefully make you a little money on eBay.
• Trash is junk: papers to be shredded, broken things that you know you'll never repair, you know the deal.
• Store is the most ambiguous: these are the boxes of things that you can't part with that don't play a role in your daily life. They're to be stored, but only so much that you have available storage space.

Want to add word or two?

Apartment Therapy or a halfway house between keep and trash. I agree: deciding that you need something or don't is easy.

Parting with it is hard. Give yourself some leeway, just don't make that leeway your entire house.

Remember, my goal here is to not drive yourself crazy, so you'll have to walk the line between storing only the things you really want to keep that aren't useful on a daily basis versus the amount of out-of-sight storage you really have.

Your comment ….?

Find New Ways to Keep the Things You Love

With your boxes and piles at the ready, pour yourself a drink and go through your rooms, drawers, and closets one by one, and group everything into one of those four categories.

While you go through each area, think about some of these ways you can have your cake and eat it too-that is, keep the item without keeping the clutter:

Take a picture of sentimental things, then let them go. If you're hanging on to an item that you know you can get rid of but you're keeping it because it was a gift or it has more emotional value than actual value to your life, take a photo of it and keep that instead.

Give items to family members or friends who'll value them. Granted, you may just be offloading your clutter to someone else, you get the satisfaction of knowing it's not in a landfill and is being used and appreciated, your friend gets a free gift, and you get your space back.

Think about the money you'll make when you sell that junk.

 Who doesn't love some extra money in their wallet?

 Let cash be your motivator to clean up: the more you sell, the more you'll make. The sooner you sell it, the sooner you'll have it.

Waffling on an item? How much do you think you could get for it on eBay?

Could that amount buy something better, or something you've been wanting?

If that item represents your hard earned money, think about how getting some of that money back will make you feel when it's in the bank, instead of locked up in an object collecting dust.

Organize, but Don't Forget to Change the Habits that Got You Here

Organizing your stuff should come after you've decided what to keep and what to get rid of.

Organizing products don't work by themselves; you have to change your habits too.

Start thinking about ways you can prevent this kind of clutter from happening again.

Challenge yourself to answer those critical questions above before you bring anything new into your home.

Ask yourself what you'll get rid of to make room for it.

Decide whether there's something else you can get that does the same thing and replaces something you already have.

If you try to be mindful before you bring something new into your life, you'll make sure the only things you add are things you really want, love, and need, versus things that just take up space.

Don’t be a sentimentalist.

People hoard for many reasons, among them the belief that their possessions will be useful or valuable in the future, have sentimental value, are unique and irreplaceable, or because they can’t decide where something goes, it’s better just to keep it.

Hoarders generally experience embarrassment about their possessions and feel uncomfortable when others see them. Their clutter often takes over functional living space, and they feel sad or ashamed the way they live.

May have functional impairments:

 - Loss of living space inside the home (no place to eat, sleep, or cook) 

 - Health hazards

Hoarding often runs in families, but it is uncertain whether DNA is involved. ... Gene research suggests that a region on chromosome 14 may be linked with compulsive hoarding in families..

Safety surrenders to stuff

inside hoarding homes, cultural norms of family life are squeezed out as parents become entrenched in the flow and placement of objects.

With a need to feel in control of a process that is clearly out of control, hoarders are unable to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy, unneeded or just “too much.”

Reasons for Hoarding.

People hoard because they believe that an item will be useful or valuable in the future. ... Those most often associated with hoarding are obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and depression