General Minimalist Strategies for your Home

General Decluttering Strategy 1: Utilize Your Wall Space One of the best ways to declutter any room in the house is to stop and take a look at the wall space.  Chances are, you might be underutilizing this space.  Walls are a great place to install shelves where your plates or coffee cups can be stored.  In other rooms of the home, wall shelving can allow you to store pillows that can have both functional and aesthetic purposes.  If you happen to be short on closet space, a great way to compensate is to install a coat hanger in the foyer or close to the front door.  Of course, if you decide to install a coat hanger, you’ll want to make sure that you’re okay with more of an open concept living space where people will be able to see your clothes on occasion.  Your walls may be just the thing that you need to get rid of those old storage boxes and stuffy closet areas you forgot even existed! General Decluttering Strategy 2: Compartmentalizing Your Drawers You can change the way you use drawers.  Drawers can be a difficult part of the house to declutter because people have a tendency to throw stuff into drawers without much thought.  A lot of us are guilty of thinking along the lines of “Well, it’s a drawer and no one can see the mess inside it.”  When you take the time to divide the space that exists within each drawer, it becomes harder to simply throw stuff

in there without thinking. Everything in a specific compartment of your drawer should have a specific purpose, and it will be easy to tell when something that is inside the drawer does not belong. You are probably already using this type of storage device for your utensils in your kitchen. These dividers are cheap and easy to install.   General Decluttering Strategy 3: Paper on Wheels Sometimes, one of the harder things to get rid of can be paper. If you aren’t sure whether or not you have to do something with a document that comes in the mail, then you’re likely to hold onto it for longer than necessary. While this is fine because you don’t want to miss a bill that you have to pay, sometimes these documents can get scattered around the house. For example, some of the mail might make its way into the kitchen, where a designated “mail drawer” may be combined with markers, post-it notes, and even crayons. Some of the mail may lay on the kitchen counter, waiting to have orange juice spilled on it. Instead of having paper all over the house, why not centralize it to a mail cart of sorts? Not only will you be able to push this savvy cart into hiding whenever it becomes convenient to do so; you’ll also be able to sort through your mail and other types of documents wherever it feels comfortable. Maybe this means rolling the cart onto the back porch while you enjoy a morning cup of coffee, or being able to sit by the fireplace and sort through your documents there.   If you do decide to have your mail and other paper documents centralized on a moving cart, another good tip is to make sure that this does not become cluttered itself. It’s important that this cart does not become your replacement for a “junk drawer” and that it keeps only the important documents. This means that you have to sort through these documents on a relatively regular basis. If you notice that this cart is beginning to look cluttered, it might be a good idea to revisit this strategy. Not all organizational methods are going to work for you. Owning a paper cart would be most useful to you if you’re someone who does not have a formal

formal desk, or if you don’t have that much paperwork but you would still enjoy some type of organizational process for your documents.   General Decluttering Strategy 4: The Four-Box Methodology This is truly more of a minimalist strategy and less of an organizational one that should be completed after the decluttering process has already been completed. To implement the four-box method, the first things that you should obtain are four boxes (surprise )

A good idea would be to write on these boxes with a big black marker, or even print out labels and stick them on the boxes. Regardless of how you do it, just make sure that you don’t confuse the boxes as you move through this process. Next, choose a room in the house that you’re going to target. It’s a good idea to only focus on one room at a time at the beginning. One item at a time, separate all of the stuff in the room to determine what you’re going to keep, donate, put into storage, and throw away. A common mistake that people make when they’re using the four-box method is that they skip over items in the pre-specified room.  Everything, and I mean everything, needs to have a place in one of the four boxes.  If you skip over certain items because you can’t decide on whether or not you should keep them, then you are missing the point of this entire exercise. No one said that it was going to be easy to choose what to keep and what to discard. Another common mistake that people make as they move through this exercise is that they put too much of their stuff in storage. Of course