Tidying, Decluttering, and Organizing Are Not the Solution
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[00:00:00] One of the biggest things that I wish somebody had told me at the beginning of my decluttering and organizing journey, is that tidying, decluttering, and organizing are not effective when your house is both messy and cluttered. And that is why we need a new home life concept that will help you tackle and overhaul all All those messes, all the things that you want to keep that you don't know what to do with so you can finally keep a tidy house before you ever start to clear away your clutter. And that's what we're diving into in this episode.
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Take Charge of Your Home Show. The podcast helping you trade in clutter and the messes for peace of mind and sanity, so you can have more time to make memories with your kids and the freedom to enjoy a nice evening to yourself every now and then amidst the chaos of never ending to do's, dinners, and diapers.
We're saying goodbye to the hot mess mom life and instead creating house Holds that are both [00:01:00] sustainable and supportive of the lives that we want to live and the things that we want to do. And I am so excited to share that we have a free decluttering challenge coming up to help you break the clutter cycle and create more breathing room in your home and your life.
It's all taking place the first week of June inside of a private Facebook group, and we're gonna go big. There will be hundreds of people coming together to make a massive change in their homes. And you're going to walk away knowing exactly what to do to get a neat and tidy home that gives you more breathing room once and for all.
So you're definitely going to want to click on the link in the show notes to save your seat. Now let's get back to our show.
Hello, hello, and welcome back to the take charge of your home show. Something that I have seen time and time again in the home life industry in the years that I have been doing this work is where people think that their house is either messy or it's cluttered. And so they're trying to [00:02:00] either tidy up or they're trying to declutter everything. When in reality, it's both. It's both messy and cluttered. So what this looks like is if you have piles of clutter You have a lot of clutter stacked away in the corners or in your closets, your cabinets, your drawers, there's just piles and spaces that are just full of stuff.
And then you also have a lot of messes and things that you want to keep that are just strewn all across your home on your kitchen counters, your nightstand, your dresser, your floors, you've got clothing draped over doorknobs and hung on the back of chairs and there's, you know, piles of dirty laundry in the bathroom and there's baskets of clean laundry sitting out in the living room and there's clean dishes sitting on the kitchen counter for days on end, and there's dirty dishes piling up in the sink, and there's clean dishes sitting in the dishwasher, and there's trash that's [00:03:00] overflowing, and there's toys all over the place, and your kid's rooms, God, you can't even walk in there.
So that's what it looks like when your house is both messy and cluttered. And time and time and time again, I've seen people, They come on zoom whether it's a private client or it's one of my students inside of my group program, Cluttered to Calm, They they come on zoom And they say, you know, my house needs to be decluttered. Or, I see videos of people saying the same thing on social media, where their house is just, it's a chaotic disaster, and they think that the solution is to declutter.
But it is crucial for you to be able to recognize that it's not either or, it's not black and white, it's not mess or clutter. It's almost always both. And this is why the Big Three Messes is such a game changer because it gives you a concrete plan for [00:04:00] every single item that is giving you trouble in your home.
First, we have the everyday messes and these are all the things that You already know where they belong, they're just not getting put there. So back to the example I just shared, this would be the clean or the dirty laundry or dishes, this would be the trash, the toys all over the floor, the clothes on the doorknobs and draped over backs of chairs. Everyday messes is all the stuff that you know exactly where it belongs, it's just not getting put there for one reason or another. Then the second of the Big Three Messes is homeless clutter. And these are the things that are getting left out around your house because you don't know where to put them. Because you don't have room to put them anywhere. And they're almost always going to be items that you want to keep.
So, an example from my own home that I noticed the other day, we have an air fryer sitting on the end of our kitchen counter and it has become a magnet for Homeless clutter. A lot of people would say that that's a magnet [00:05:00] for clutter and yes, homeless clutter is technically clutter because it's piling up, but the reason I really want to distinguish the difference between the two is because, like I said, when you are able to identify and distinguish these Big Three Messes in your home, you'll know exactly what to do with them.
If you believe that the stuff piling up on your air fryer on your kitchen counter is clutter, you will try to declutter it. And then in turn, you will end up doing those same strategies when it comes to the real clutter that's piling up in your closet. But that needs an entirely different strategy. The way that you declutter a large pile of true clutter in the back of your closet needs to be drastically different than how you declutter a small little pile of things that's sitting on top of your air fryer.
So that's why it's very important to really identify that what the homeless clutter is. So the homeless clutter is essentially any item [00:06:00] that is left out in your home because you don't know what to do with it, because you don't know where to put it, because you don't have any room for it.
And the kicker here, what's really important for you to learn fully grasp and understand is the reason why you don't have room for these homeless items is because there is too much true clutter piling up behind closed doors in your closets, cabinets, drawers, shelves, et cetera. And that brings us to the third of the Big Three Messes.
It's the true accumulated clutter. Like I just said, it's the things that are piling up and accumulating in places. True accumulated clutter is almost always going to be things that you're not sure what it really all consists of, but the solution is that you need to sort through it and let go of as much as you can.
So what this comes down to is that when your house is both messy and cluttered, it's because there's a combination of things that you want to keep that are left out that need to be put away, as well as [00:07:00] items that you don't know what to do with because you don't have room for them. And there's also accumulated clutter piling up in different areas around your house. And the problem is that neither decluttering or organizing or tidying really make much of a difference when your house is both messy and cluttered.
So professional organizers and their methods and the way that they teach you to organize your home, that's never going to help you actually organize a messy home because that their methods are designed to help their clients get more organized. And then when it comes to tidying the constant tidying up and the cleaning up after your kids, that doesn't work because most of the messes that are lying around, Most of them are there because you don't know what to do with them. They're the homeless items, meaning they don't have a permanent home where they belong, and therefore you can't tidy them up because [00:08:00] you don't know where to put them, which is why you resort to just kind of straightening them up and making it look more orderly on the end of your kitchen counter. But, again, organizing won't work because you don't even have space to organize these things because there's still too much clutter taking up all of your storage areas, like your closets, cabinets, and drawers.
So, it seems like that would leave de cluttering. Like, the solution is to declutter and purge the excess so you can have room for all of these things, right? Well, not necessarily. I have first hand experience with how this is not always plausible. In fact, after our house fire last summer, we were obviously left with the bare bones minimum in terms of our belongings. But as the months passed, a lot of homeless clutter started forming around our house because we did not have [00:09:00] anywhere to put things. And the solution was not, it was definitely not to declutter because we didn't even have anything to declutter. So to give you a more concrete example, Like my makeup, you know, I literally did not have a basket to put all of my makeup in, either in the bathroom or the linen closet, or on the shelf above our toilet, or anything along those lines. So instead, I would inadvertently leave the makeup out on the bathroom counter because I did not have a dedicated spot to put the makeup away. Or as another example, my kids toys. Oh man, those would just pile up in my younger two kids, it would just pile up in their rooms because there literally wasn't a toy box or even a bin or anything to even put their toys in.
And so again, as I said, the solution was not to de clutter because we didn't even have any belongings, but yet we still had homeless clutter. So that's a prime example of how You can have a lot of homeless clutter, you can have a lot of messes that are left [00:10:00] out, but de cluttering isn't always going to work.
Now I do realize, I do want to acknowledge that for most of you that are listening to this episode, That's not the case. You did not have a house fire. You did not lose all of your belongings. I know that for most of you, you will have a lot of clutter that's piling up behind closed doors, as well as the messes that are getting left out on the surface layer of your home. But, It's still not plausible to declutter because for example, if your counters are just Overflowing with stuff, if your kitchen counters are piled high with a bunch of things and it looks messy, Of course you're not going to want to dig into the back of your Kitchen cabinets to declutter ten year old pots and pans, when all you want is to be able to keep a tidy home. And this is precisely why it's so hard to figure out where to start decluttering when the messes are everywhere, that's all that you can see is the messes all across your home. [00:11:00] Everything that you can see with the naked eye is just stuff that you want to keep.
So, instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying all the things, instead of randomly tidying and decluttering and organizing and cleaning over and over and over again, what you need is a plan to optimize both the clutter and the messes.
And so the good news is that we already know how to tackle the clutter. We know that decluttering is what you need to do, is the solution, it's the antidote for the accumulated clutter. You need to sort through it and let go of as much as you can. So that just leaves the messes. What we need is another home life concept that encompasses what it takes to tackle the messes. Because those items, those messes, are exactly why it's so hard to keep a clean and tidy house. The random stuff that's left out everywhere that you don't know what to [00:12:00] do with, Like a piece of paper that doesn't have a home, so it just sits on your nightstand for a month straight, or when your utility closet is inaccessible and hard to get to, so you just end up leaving your broom and mop leaning against the fridge for two months, or all that random stuff that's taking over your dining room table because That's the most logical solution for the time being. These are all the messes, and you need to have a plan, another home life concept that encompasses how you can tackle these messes as a whole for your entire household. Because it's not enough to just tidy up your kitchen every single day because that still leaves the mop and broom sitting there if you still can't get to your utility closet. And organizing your paperwork won't help at all if you still don't know what to do with that random paper on your nightstand or the stack of mail on your desk.
And that, my friends, is exactly why I have developed this plan [00:13:00] for these messes. It's called overhauling. And it is a total game changer because when you get these messes under control, it paves the way for decluttering to be a heck of a lot easier. Overhauling is the step zero that will get you a clean and tidy house with everything put where it belongs, so then it will be super simple to discern where to start decluttering and what to let go of.
This step zero of overhauling the messes first and foremost is the key to finally taking charge of your home. And we're going to go over this plan during our Breathing Room challenge so that way, you know exactly what to do. So that way you have the step by step roadmap to get a neat and tidy, organized home that runs on autopilot for years to come. First. I'm going to tell you exactly what to do to overhaul [00:14:00] the messes, both the everyday messes and the homeless clutter so you can tackle them and tidy them up and get them under control once and for all. Then we'll go over my proven methods to ditch the clutter with ease, to clear away the accumulated clutter, to sort through and decide what to let go of so that way you can have more room and more space in your house. And then finally, we'll dive into the Organizing Trifecta, which is my secret strategy to help busy moms get organized and stay organized for good.
The Breathing Room Challenge is my favorite event of the entire year, and this is actually our last free event before I take an extended leave of absence to focus on my health and personal issues. As I have recently found out that I have blockages in my arteries, up to 75 percent blockages, and, you know, I'm still trying to buy a new house from our house fire. My son had a seizure a few weeks ago, and we also had to put my dog [00:15:00] Harvey down. So, it's been a lot, i, I have a lot going on right now. So I'm gonna take some time off to heal and recover and focus on myself and my family and, and really re center myself from everything that has happened over the last year. And so with that said, my, my point in telling you this is that We're going to go big during the Breathing Room Challenge. This Decluttering Challenge is going to be huge. We're going to have hundreds of people coming together, mastering the messes, breaking free from the clutter cycle, decluttering like a boss, taking charge of their homes, and creating more breathing room so they can have peace of mind, sanity, hours of free time each week, and the freedom to enjoy this time of their lives.
And I'm very, very honored to have you join us. So I'm going to put the link in the show notes for you to get all registered and save your seat. This is the [00:16:00] event that you're not going to want to miss. Like I said, we're going to go big, there's going to be lots of prizes. Lots of giveaways, a week's worth of live sessions, we're going to be making a massive change in your home, and I'm very, very, very much looking forward to having you there. So as always, if you have any questions, you can send me a DM on Instagram. Otherwise go save your seat, go get all signed up before you forget. And I will chat with you soon.
