Ahh, it’s Spring cleaning time again! This year the cleaning bug bit me hard and I went from room to room looking for junk that was cluttering up my house and my life. Armed with a large cardboard box and a roll of trash bags, I scoured each room for trash and donate-able items. If I found an item that might have value to someone else, it went in the donation box while worthless, spent junk went in the bag. By the time I finished the upstairs, I had filled up the box more than twice and carted out three bags of trash.
Cramped closets quickly opened up and a stuffed spare bedroom became accessible again. It wasn’t like they were packed with garbage. On the contrary, everything that was removed from those rooms was purchased with good intentions but just never left when its usefulness had expired.
Clutter is dangerous in many ways. It can be a fire or health hazard when it impedes your movement or gathers too much dust, it can sap the usefulness of your home by wasting space, and it can steal your money by forcing you to re-buy things you already own.
Clutter Is a Hazard
While finishing our basement, we were forced to move all our stored belongings to an unused upstairs bedroom. Box after box was moved to the room until there was no more free space and then we closed the door. Over the winter, more things were shoved into that “temporary” storage room until they no longer fit and we were forced to stack things next to the door in the hallway.
I can’t tell you how many times I stubbed my toe on a box, or had to shuffle around the stuff while carrying my baby. Now imagine if (heaven forbid) we had a fire. That junk suddenly endangers the lives of my whole family by possibly blocking a useful exit from our home.
After the first round of Spring cleaning, the hallway is clear and more than half of the stuff stored in that room has been thrown away, donated, or filed away where it belonged in the first place.
Clutter Wastes Space and Time
For the last year and a half, I have been unable to park my truck in the garage. Shelves stuffed with things I thought I might need later multiplied into tools, equipment, and supplies stacked on the garage floor and taking up a full parking spot. Last week, I entered the garage with a mission of parking the new car we’re planning to buy in its rightful place in the garage from Day 1. After a few hours of heavy labor, I had two truck loads of things to donate and an almost-clean garage. I still have a few more hours of work to organize my space, but I should be able to park inside again soon.
By letting that junk accumulate over the last three years, I prevented myself from using my garage for its original purpose and I had to brave the elements every day I left for work. I can’t even being to imagine the hours I wasted over those years scraping frost, snow, and ice from my truck. So, as a side effect of the wasted space, it also wasted my time.
Clutter Costs You Money
While cleaning out one closet, I found six dusty, empty picture frames. This discovery came just a few days after buying three new picture frames to display the latest photos of our children. Since I forgot about those frames, I ended up wasting $10 on new frames.
In the same closet, I found two piles of winter clothes that had been stacked last Spring to make room for warm-weather clothes. This winter, I was forced to buy two new pairs of jeans and a few shirts to fill a gap in my wardrobe. What I didn’t know was that “gap” could have been filled about five feet below where the new clothes were hung. Now that I’ve already replaced those clothes, they’ll be donated instead of stored for another year.
Donate Your Clutter and Claim Your Tax Reward
Twice each year, my church hosts a rummage sale where people bring in “yard sale or better” quality items and the church sells them as a fundraiser for missions. If your church or another organization you support doesn’t host sales like that, you can always donate to the Salvation Army, Goodwill, or other charity thrift stores.
The important thing to remember is to track the proper resale value of the donated items. A general rule of thumb is to claim no more than the average amount that the item could be resold for at a thrift store or yard sale. Both the Salvation Army and Goodwill websites include basic valuation guides. While it’s a mostly on-your-honor deduction, the last thing you want to do is suffer an audit for improperly claiming donations. (For more information on the rules concerning charitable donations, see IRS Publication 526.)
The easiest way to handle this is to document everything you donate before you take it to the charity and (if you’re very cautious) take photos of all the donated items. That way you can help prove you donated the items and it will help in assigning values to the items. We ended up with two pages worth of donations listed with an estimated value of nearly $300. While it’s not a huge amount, that’s “free money” come tax time when listing our charitable donations.
Enjoy Your Reclaimed Space
It’s amazing how good it feels to be able to walk through the hallway safely, no matter what time of day or night. It’s great to walk into our closet and immediately find exactly what I’m looking for. It’s liberating to have the room to properly store my belongings in our designated storage areas instead of “wherever I find room”.
Now that you’re free from clutter, your next goal should be to keep it from coming back. Easier said than done, I know, but just remember how this feels right now and it should be easier.
Photo by: sindesign
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I’m starting to get the spring itch to clean and sort out. I don’t have a lot of clutter – two moves in as many years took care of a lot of it, but there are still spaces I could be using a lot more efficiently.