3 Easy Ways to Declutter your Home

Elizabeth Pardi shares strategies for involving children in keeping an orderly home.

In a home of six people, the puddles of clutter that accumulate around our house are ceaseless. Kids’ crafts, mail, kids’ crafts, miscellaneous chargers, kids’ crafts, hats, keys, did I say kids’ crafts? It goes without saying that we have a tiny but exceptionally fast-producing craft-lady living here.

The thing is, I don’t function very well amid messes and clutter. I can’t cook or really focus well on any task in a messy kitchen, which is where the majority of our clutter winds up. I’m working on my focusing skills, but in the meantime, I’ve had to come up with – or copy from other moms or Pinterest – creative ways to keep the clutter at bay.

Here are three methods that have significantly helped maintain tidiness around here.

Stairs Baskets

I’m a firm believer in a place for everything and everything in its place, but often, when I’m on a cleaning spree, I simply don’t know where to put something, especially if its owner isn’t around. Enter, the stairs baskets. We have four of them, each sitting on its own stair and labeled for a different bedroom.

In theory, they’re meant for things that need to be taken up to people’s rooms. However, they function more as parking spots for crap I simply don’t know where to place, which I’m perfectly fine with.

When the craft-lady asks what happened to the “purse” she made from an empty juice bottle and scotch tape, “Check your stairs basket.” If my husband realizes he needs the business card someone gave him weeks ago, “Probably in your stairs basket.” The result? They have their things back and those things didn’t have to become members of the countertop clutter club. Win/win.

Take a picture of it

Okay. Obviously, the space in the stairs baskets is not infinite. I can only pile so many juice bottle purses in a nine-by- fourteen-inch area. Plus there’s the relieving – I mean – convenient possibility that the craft-lady will simply forget about that particular masterpiece and passing by it on the stairs will only remind her of it multiple times a day.

For that reason, I often snap a picture of her creation and then banish it to the recycling bin. This enables me to create photo albums of the kids’ artwork over the years and if she does inquire about the purse’s whereabouts, I can assure her that its memory lives on.

But the take-a-picture method can be used far beyond preserving treasures like juice bottle handbags. I snap photos of those abandoned business cards, important receipts, invitations, warranties, coupons, you name it. Our home is where hard copies go to die and I’m not even sorry. They have a happy afterlife in my phone in an album tailored just for them and their kin.

Incentivize your kids

I’ve heard stories about those mythical moms who somehow train their children to naturally and happily clean up after themselves. But here at our house, messes get made and then walked away from for hours or days at a time. That is, until, the inevitable request for screen time comes along.

This one I learned from a Messy Family Project podcast, in which Alicia revealed how irksome she finds it when kids are watching TV in a messy room. Me, too, friend. Me. Too. Our rule is that if someone wants to watch a show, they need to tidy up the room and occasionally some other clutter they’re capable of cleaning. Whining or backtalk earns them an extra five or ten minutes of cleaning before a show goes on so they’ve learned (for the most part) to suck it up and pick up.

Click to tweet:
Our home is where hard copies go to die and I’m not even sorry. #catholicmom

I’m probably more interested in keeping order than the average mom, and yes, I often have to remind myself to be less Martha and more Mary, simply sitting at Christ’s feet by reading Scripture, sitting in the infrequent silence or cuddling with my kids despite the messy state of the room I’m in.

But we can’t overlook the need for tidiness in a home. In fact, orderliness is considered a virtue so we have the responsibility to train our kids in it. Plus, having things in order and easy to access and utilize sets us free of so many frustrations and time constraints. I haven’t mastered this virtue by any means, but it’s definitely one I enjoy growing in.

What are some simple ways you’ve maintained order in your own home?

Copyright 2021 Elizabeth Pardi
Images: stairs basket copyright 2021 Elizabeth Pardi, all rights reserved; all others Canva Pro