Happy December, friends! Can you believe it’s the last month of 2024? This year absolutely flew by for us–pregnancy and election notwithstanding–and I’ve just about wrapped up my holiday shopping 🙂 I’m ready to settle in for a month of festivities with (ideally) low stress and Christmas to-do’s.
Speaking of the holidays… another project I’m working on at the moment is our pre-Christmas decluttering. With four kids, generous grandparents and extended family, holiday craft projects from school and two winter birthdays after the holidays, things can get seriously messy in our house during the winter.
But whether you have one kid or five, the sheer amount of stuff entering your house around the holidays gets overwhelming fast. What’s a busy mom to do when she doesn’t have endless hours to devote to sifting through toy boxes, storage bins and the recesses of the pantry?
Eliminating Clutter Hotspots Altogether
My latest strategy is simple: I’m working on eliminating clutter hotspots, those landing areas for stuff that seem to get hopelessly cluttered within a few days. Those spots where, no matter how many times you declutter, they fill up again instantly with all matters of odds and ends. Junk drawers, closet shelves, mail organizers, the end of the dining room table… wherever it is for you, most of us have at least one space like this.
The first spot I decided to tackle in our home was the mail organizer. It had three trays and an end compartment that was always overflowing with odds and ends like broken toys, office supplies, hairbands, screwdrivers ,etc. It had a big footprint on our kitchen island and it was ugly.
So instead of clearing it out for the 1000th time this year I decided: time to get rid of it.
I found homes for all the papers and miscellanea, recycled and tossed a bunch of things. Then I immediately gave the organizer away on our Buy Nothing group (to resist the temptation to fill it up again). Voila! Now when papers come into our house, they are immediately filed or dealt with–there’s simply not a convenient space to store them.
For me, clutter hotspots like that are really just physical holding spots for decisions I need to make. Do I need to take my car into the shop because there was a recall on the airbags? (Yes.) Do I need to put this cute free water bottle sticker on a water bottle? (No.) Am I actually going to figure out how to fix this matchbox car? (Also no.)
I recently finished a little gem of a book, The Nesting Place by Myquillyn Smith. It’s a book about home decorating, but I think this quote is quite relevant to many areas of life (including decluttering):
At times, good enough and done is a smarter choice than perfect, and simply making a choice is often a sign of maturity, balance, and contentment.
I might not have decluttered the mail organizer perfectly, but the best possible decisions were made given my time constraints, and the project is done now.
What Are Your Hotspots?
What are those spots for you–the ones that are always unsightly and overflowing? Here are some common ones:
- Mail organizers
- Junk drawers/boxes
- Bookshelves–both on the shelves and on top!
- Front hall storage (we have a BIG entryway storage problem in our house–which, now that I think about it, is probably an indicator that we own too many hats, not that there isn’t enough space)
- Dining room tables and countertops
- Nightstands
- Office surfaces
How can you make these spots inhospitable to clutter? Can you get rid of them altogether?
When we moved out of our first house, it was an eye-opening experience for me to declutter our bookshelves. We had two towering bookshelves (five shelves each plus a drawer on the bottom) that were completely full. Not just with books, but also various decor items, DVDs, and miscellaneous bits and pieces that we wanted to keep out of reach of our two toddlers.
I donated, sold or trashed about 80% of the bookshelf contents because not only did I not read/use/appreciate them, I definitely didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to ship them abroad! Then, I gave away the bookshelves. They looked ridiculous with the tiny quantity of stuff that was left on them.
When we moved into our new house, we bought two IKEA cube shelves and put them right next to each other as a sort of small, modular bookshelf. On this bookshelf, I store… books. And when it gets full, I give books away. We don’t need or want more books than what these shelves can hold.
In a world where we’re constantly told that bigger is better, dare to downsize. Whether it’s getting rid of your mail organizer, replacing your dining room table with something smaller or moving into a smaller house. Work on eliminating your clutter hotspots and making those little decisions every day–practice makes, well, imperfect but functional.
xx Claire