Reasons You Can’t Get Rid of Your House’s Clutter

It’s all too common that people hang onto things longer than they need to. The perpetual need to keep things that we might need later is an instinct that humans have had for as long as they’ve been around. If you’re a bit of a pack rat yourself, you are by no means alone in the tendency. There are a few reasons you can’t get rid of your house’s clutter, and learning about them will help you identify how to work through them.

You Keep Waiting for Things To Settle Down

Decluttering our homes is something that we usually put off until “later,” which could mean any number of things. Life gets in the way, and things start to pile up around us as we tell ourselves that, once things calm down, we’ll clean everything up. If you start noticing that you always put off decluttering until another time, ask yourself why you can’t simply do it right now. Even a little bit goes a long way.

You See It as One Huge Project

If your whole house seems to be the problem, it’s probably because you hold onto the belief that decluttering must be a one-and-done event. A big reason you can’t get rid of your house’s clutter is because you aren’t breaking up the monumental task into smaller ones. To fix this, try:

• Only decluttering one room at a time
• Giving yourself frequent breaks from the task
• Keeping a small area clean for a while and then expanding it outward

The goal is to not overwhelm yourself with the prospect of tackling everything at once. Slow it down, and you’ll find much more success

You Don’t Have a System of Organization

If you don’t have some idea of how you want to organize things, decluttering just becomes moving items from one random place to another. Before you start to reign in the mess, plan out what you want the space to look like in the end. Give everything a place so that you know where to put the items you’re keeping. Creating an organization structure will help you decide what you can hang onto and what needs to go.

You Aren’t Sure What To Do With Everything

Sometimes, the problem is simply that you don’t know where all that junk is supposed to go. For almost everything, though, you can separate items by the following categories:

• Things you’re going to keep
• Things you plan to sell
• Things you can donate
• Things that belong in the trash

You can reorganize the things you’re keeping, post the things you want to sell online, and call a place like the Purple Heart Pickup to grab your donations. Then, all that’s left are the items that you’ve already decided you’re comfortable with throwing away.