Ah yes, de-cluttering. The opposite of buying stuff and junk and things we love and allowing them to sit and take up space, get dusty and broken and lost.  Lets talk about how to go about De-cluttering.

Every time I think about De-cluttering I think of a friend I had many years ago.  Her home was so CUTE.  Stinkin’ cute.   She had walls full of old general store signs, kitchen tools, pictures and cutesy stuff. Her living room was crowded but cute. There were doilies on everything that sat still for a few minutes, silk flowers, grapevine wreaths with bows, wooden boxes and shelves and it all coordinated perfectly! She could have given Cracker Barrel lessons in decorating.  It was so….CUTE! Actually her house looked more like a store selling country decorating items than a home.

After she’d been moved in for a while, and after about 3 months of continuous hammering of decorating nails and placing of doilies, her house started to get dusty.  I wondered if she and her family noticed the dust. Then one day she mentioned that she was cleaning the house one room at a time.  It took her weeks to complete one room, dusting and cleaning and polishing and putting everything back. Then she would move to the next room.

I am sure you can see the merry-go-round she was on. No sooner was the cycle done than she had to repeat it. I was so glad that cute house wasn’t mine. Her whole life revolved around cleaning her house and keeping up with her collectibles. I don’t want to be controlled by my STUFF.

The first rule of De-Cluttering is – get rid of the stuff that controls you.  Have only things in your house that are useful or that you consider beautiful.

A few tips:

• Don’t keep every school paper Junior or Juniorette brings home. Take some pictures of the big stuff like projects and keep a few representative papers from each school year. Then you’ve got the makings of a good scrapbook.
• If you keep newspapers and magazines, at least find a way to keep them neat and tidy.
• Keep the nicnac population in your home down to a bare minimum. You don’t really need a nicnac to remember a person. The memory is what is important, not the stuff.
• Consider keeping all those family and other portraits in a large photo album or having one table in your home where you can show off all your framed pictures.  If you have frames hanging all over the wall, someone has to dust them and straighten them. Regularly.  Guess who?
• When you decide to bring another thing/stuff/collectible/item into your home…. be wiling to get rid of something else in its place.

The Basics of De-cluttering:

• First pick up the room and put things that belong in the room, away where it all goes.
• Get yourself three baskets, boxes or large trash bags.  This isn’t a new method. I first saw this method in a very old Better Homes and Garden magazine. So people have been dealing with clutter for a long time.
• Label the boxes or baskets or bags:    KEEP ….  THROW AWAY …..  GIVE AWAY
• Put everything in the room into one of those boxes. The only things that won’t go into one of those boxes are things that actually go in the room you are de-cluttering. And those things should be put away where they go. Now.
• Take the three boxes out of the room, we’ll deal with them in a few.
• Now look around the room. What can you live without?; Get rid of it and put it in one of the boxes. What needs to be in another room?; Take it there.
• The room is now ready to be cleaned, so dust, wash, clean and mop to your heart’s content.
• Now its time to do the hard stuff.  Take that GIVEAWAY box and put it in your car, right now. Take it to the local Goodwill or other thrift store. NOW. And while you are at it ……
• Take that box marked THROW AWAY and put it in the trash outside, or take it to a dumpster.
• Are you back?  Good, now you can take the box marked PUT AWAY and put everything away that is in it. These are things that don’t go in the room you were de-cluttering.

The room is done! You can start on the next one now. And maybe its the last time you will have to be on this particular merry-go-round.

Since I regularly have large crowds of people to our home to eat and hang out, and I have a large one coming for Thanksgiving, I thought I’d take time to tell you what all I do to prepare for a crowd. It is handy to know a few tips and short cuts so that when a group of missionaries or family comes in to town, you don’t feel so panicky when they ask to come to your house.

Someone once asked me how I got accustomed to having large groups over and didn’t it stress me. I don’t get stressed when lots of people are in my home. I just dive right in and ask people over. I don’t try to impress them, I just try to provide something good to eat, some good company and a nice clean space to move around in. No, it doesn’t stress me… unless I think I don’t have enough food made!

Most people don’t come to your house to be impressed or to critique you and your house. And if they do, that’s their problem, you have better things to do than to worry over what someone thinks about your house and cooking.

Here are the basics. You don’t need to use all of them, just choose the ones that will help you….

* Plan a simple, delicious, satisfying meal that consists of a main course, a carbohydrate, a vegetable, a salad and a dessert.
* Don’t be afraid to ask your guests to bring a dish of food to share.
* Provide ice and water in addition to your regular beverage.
* Make tea and other beverages ahead of time and refrigerate so you won’t need so much ice.
* Cook everything possible ahead of time. Utilize that Crockpot!
* Set the table the night before.
* Set a separate table for young adults and older children. Make it as pretty as the main table.
* Make sure your centerpiece is not too tall to hold conversation across the table.
* Use thick paper plates and napkins if you feel you don’t have enough china or glass dishes to go ’round.
* Provide separate, small plates for dessert.
* Make sure you have plenty of seating. We borrow chairs from church.
* Set your kitchen up as a buffet area to keep the dining table free of things.It just makes it nicer when the table is clear.
* Use a large piece of wood, covered with fabric to lay over your sink to give more room for setting up the buffet.
* Count and lay out your serving dishes the day before.
* Use an ice chest for ice and canned drinks.
* Assign one or two persons to fill glasses with ice before the meal.
* Assign one person to prepare the salad, if you choose an older woman you won’t even have to direct her!
* Assign someone to ask a blessing long before the meal so it doesn’t surprise them too much.
* If you have lots of children coming, find something interesting for them to do before and after the meal. I sometimes cover their table with a white paper table cloth and provide crayons and water color markers.