Part I - Creating Harmonious Homes - Managing Clutter

Your home should bring you calm and peace!

I found an uplifting article about how to create and maintain a calm, harmonious home listing multiple steps and strategies.

Your home gives you a foundation to connect mind, body and spirit. Your home grounds you and gives you a sacred space to connect to your inner light. Your body allow you to move with energy and vitality as you go through your day and connect with your world. A calm mind lets you face everyday challenges with ease, grace and poise. Connecting to your spirit allows your inner light to radiate and illuminates your path on your journey - link to article

A key step is to "de-clutter". Evidently, cluttering is a major negative energy drainer and disrupts the positive vibes one should get at home.  There are TONS of articles, books, advice columns about managing clutter. I found that many refer to distinguishing types of clutter and working with the easiest form first.

Clutter is a thief that robs you day after day of happiness and energy. Most people have two kinds of clutter: memory clutter or "I-might-need-it-one-day" clutter. However, we all struggle with the 'lazy clutter' and that's what we need to tackle first. Lazy clutter is all the stuff that accumulates out of negligence over time. It's not stuff you care too much about, so you ignore it: un-filed papers, unopened junk mail, magazines, unwanted gifts or that freebie cap you brought home from the grocery store but will never wear. Lazy clutter is little more than trash and one of the few purposes it serves is to accumulate on every flat surface in your home. link to more information and articles. 

We are not particularly messy people but are always working on de-cluttering strategies. One effort we make annually has had enormous benefits. We have a garage sale which encourages me to go through every corner of my home to contribute items and to judge whether something is useful or not. Whatever doesn't sell, goes to charity. I highly recommend this strategy. Or, if you don't enjoy the garage sale process (I, of course, do), just skip that part and bring the stuff immediately to a charitable organization. It really feels good!

My daughter and husband are both much better at de-cluttering than I am. Here are a couple of unique/interesting strategies they use:

• Small children are constantly bringing things/toys/stuff out and leaving them laying around. Toys have a way of making it outside of the bedroom and play rooms to all parts of the house.  My daughter has placed attractive baskets on her steps - one for each of her two children. The kids place items to be returned upstairs into the basket and they go upstairs every evening to be refilled the next day.
• Spices and other packaged//long-term items in kitchen cupboards tend to be forgotten and when using new or infrequently used recipes, I had forgotten what I already had and was buying multiples (up to 4X in some cases) which just ended up being stored with the other clutter in the cupboards. My husband actually took an inventory (laminated it) and placed it in my spice drawer. I have proudly shown this to friends who would like his services. I have not had to buy any spices or condiments for quite a while.

I agree that minimizes clutter in a home has enormous impact on both the physical space and your feelings about it. I am will be featuring additional strategies to create a harmonious home in the next few weeks.