With New Year’s resolution season coming soon, mid-winter is the second-most popular time of year to commit to an organized home. (The most popular is spring.)
We consulted three local professionals to help as you declutter, figure out what to do with unused items and create new organizational systems in your home: Rebecca Ruest of My Personal Assistant; Andrea Hancock of Dexterous Organizing; and Karen Gardiner of Simplify for Life.
Defining the Space and Creating a ‘Home’ for Things
The are two initial steps to cleaning and organizing any room. First is defining the space, Hancock says. “Is that basement just for storage? Entertainment? A home gym? Once you know what you'll be using the space for, you can then start to create zones and then determine how the room will flow, how much storage you'll need, and how much of what you'll need to keep.”
The second is defining your goals. “Finding your motivation for cleaning—finding bigger goals than the task at hand—can help,” Gardiner says. “Whether it’s having friends over or having more space for the kids to play, finding concrete goals beyond just getting it clean can help cut down on being overwhelmed.”
Then, creating a “home” for everything is critical to preventing clutter from reappearing.
“The most useful tip I have is to truly have a home for everything and to make sure that everyone understands where things are kept,” Gardiner says. “This rule forces some clients to realize they have too much stuff when homes are established and ‘stuff’ doesn't fit.”
By keeping like things together, creating easy access to frequently used items and color-coding or labeling bins and drawers, cleaning up on a routine basis becomes much easier.
“Going vertical with shelving for stored items keep them from spreading into useful zones and labeling things in bins helps you to store them in a way for better retrieval, which should be the point of putting anything ‘away.’” Your future self should be able to find things and easily access them when they’re needed, Hancock says.
“We all let things get out of hand occasionally or more-than occasionally, but if you know what to do with the mess that has accumulated, you can do a 10-minute tidy and call it a night,” Ruest says. “You’ll wake up the next day feeling much better than you would have.”
When people don’t have a place to put everything, boxes of randomness and unused items often wind up in closets, basements, attics, spare bedrooms and home offices.
Ruest says when tackling a storage area, do the most manageable portion of the job first—“do the part that’s easiest to make decisions about or the part that will clear out and make a visual difference. That way you see immediate results, and it encourages you to go on and do more.”
Is it time to call a professional organizer? Should you rent a storage unit? Click here to read our January feature story ‘Decluttering for the New Year’ for guidance.
Paper Clutter
Receipts, junk mail, bills, insurance statements, school forms — the amount of paper that comes into a home is pretty amazing.
“It’s best to have a place for paper that comes in the house, whether it’s mail, schoolwork or whatever else gets brought in,” Ruest says. She recommends having a separate file, folder or slot for each person in the home and to keep that place relatively small. “That way it will look full faster and ideally, you’ll deal with it sooner.”
Sometimes, deciding whether paper should be kept or destroyed paralyzes people. Gardiner recommends starting with a relatively conservative list of what to keep from the IRS, USA.gov or Bankrate. “I find a lot of people keep unnecessary paper because they aren't sure if they may need it. Once this hurdle is crossed I then discuss ways to keep paper out of their house so there is less to process.”
To stop junk mail from arriving in the first place, put yourself on the list at catalogchoice.org and through the Direct Marketing Association opt-out form online to stop catalogs and pre-screened bank offers. In addition, Hancock recommends signing up for paperless statements from all banks, credit card companies and investment accounts. You can sign-up for FileThis.com, which pulls in bank statements in the past and every month for up to 6 companies.
For many people, dealing with the paper that remains often involves scanning it and getting rid of the physical paper. Ruest recommends using the Scannable app to scan and get rid of paper clutter for smaller jobs. For getting rid of larger amounts of paper that have accumulated over time, she recommends using Neat, a scanning and organizing app that works across devices (mobile phones and computers). Gardiner recommends Evernote, which lets you save scanned paper, articles and more in an organized fashion.
When paper has accumulated and needs to be shredded, where do you go? Several UPS Store locations have locked bins from Iron Mountain, a shredding company. Iron Mountain routinely picks up these bins for off-site shredding.
CommonWealth One Federal Credit Union also offers free annual “Shred Day” events, as do many home owners and community associations for those with boxes of papers to shred. But to prevent paper from accumulating, the best thing to do is buy a small paper shredder for your home and use it on a routine basis.
Receipts
Receipts seem to be in a category of their own in terms of paper clutter.
“For receipts, only keep them in one or two places,” Hancock says. “Your wallet—not at the bottom of the bag of the store you purchased from—and a large envelope or freezer bag is sufficient. The main thing is not to lose them or store them in multiple places. When cleaning out your wallet, purge the receipts that have lost relevance…. Then, transfer to the envelope and label by year, or if you have many purchases it might be a good idea to keep them by month.”
Particularly for business owners, having a system for receipts can make accounting much easier. “If a person has time and organization skills to handle it (or can delegate it), you can use your phone as a scanner directly into Google Drive and throw away the receipt, or an accounting software like QuickBooks to actually record the transaction to send to your accountant,” Hancock says.
There are several mobile apps that can take photos of receipts, categorize and date them for future reference, as well. Highly rated apps include Shoeboxed, Receipts by Wave, and Expensify.
Electronics Recycling and Destruction
Most major manufacturers allow you to mail back electronics for recycling — check with the manufacturer of your cell phone, hard drive or other electronics for services they offer.
Cell phones in particular can be provided for victims of domestic violence. Remove your SIM card and delete all data, then donate old cell phones to Secure the Call, which works with local police departments.
Cell phones may also be recycled through ReCellular, Inc., Recycle for Breast Cancer, or at most Best Buy or Staples locations.
Shred Station Express in Alexandria also takes electronics for destruction by appointment, including hard drives.
Electronics that do not have sensitive data on them can be recycled at 3324 Colvin Street, the Household Hazardous Waste & Electronics Collection Center for the City of Alexandria. The City of Alexandria facility can also take refrigerators, freezers, air conditioning units and dehumidifiers. It is open Saturdays and Mondays from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. (See more about what this facility does and does not take here.)
In Fairfax County, residents can bring electronics to the I-66 Transfer Station (4618 West Ox Road, Fairfax) or the I-95 Landfill Complex (9850 Furnace Road, Lorton). Some government offices also accept cell phones. (See more here about Fairfax County facilities here, including hours and what is and is not accepted.)
Clothing
Dozens of local shelters, charities and nonprofit organizations are constantly looking for gently used clothing. Check with your local religious leadership, school or charity for information on how and what to donate. The region also has multiple consignment shops.
For business attire, such as men’s and women’s suits, Suited for Change in Washington, DC accepts clothes for people trying to enter the workforce.
More locally, consider donating to the Catholic Charities Thrift Shop or Bethany House of Northern Virginia.
Ball gowns and tuxedos can be donated to Princess for a Night, which provides prom dresses and tuxes to high school students in Alexandria and Fairfax County. Contact the school systems for more information.
Medicine Cabinet and Linen Closet
Local police departments and sheriff’s offices in Alexandria and Fairfax County host frequent prescription “drug take back” days, where residents can drop off unused or expired prescription and non-prescription medications. The Neighborhood Pharmacy in Del Ray has a permanent prescription drug drop-off box if you don’t want to wait for an event.
Be careful of how you store medications — the heat and steam from your shower can affect them, so keeping them in the linen closet or another area with good ventilation is a better idea.
In the linen closet, using boxes and bins to separate items can help—for example, one for "injuries" (bandaids, first aid kits, antibiotic ointments) and a separate one for "illnesses" (cold medicine, headache medicine and the like) can help you find things quickly and easily.
Did you know?
The tradition of Spring cleaning dates back centuries with rituals surrounding Passover and the Iranian and Chinese New Year’s celebrations. However, the modern urge to purge (and clean) may be related to melatonin levels — humans produce less of the “lazy chemical” in the spring and summer months, so we feel like we have more energy when the days get longer.
