Making decisions as to what to keep, what to donate, what to discard, what to shred, and what to recycle is probably going to be one of the hardest things you have to do.  Lots of memories may be attached to your “things”, but if you are able to keep the bigger picture in mind, it may help.  You are downsizing so you have less to take care of, and you want others to enjoy the things that you’ve enjoyed throughout the years.  In addition, there may be things that are no longer useful, so getting rid of items like that is freeing as well (Do you really need your electric bills from 1990?).

Try asking yourself the following yes/no questions.  If you can’t come up with a sound reason to keep your item, now is the time to part with it.

• Do I have a definitive use for the item, and am I even using it?
• When was the last time I used the item?
• Will the item fit into my new house?
• Does the item need to be repaired or is it totally broken?
• Does this item serve a worthwhile purpose in my life?
• Do I need to keep the item for legal purposes?
• Do I love the item?

 TIP

Be patient.  It took you how long to accumulate everything?

If in doubt, keep it or take a picture of the item.

You are allowed to change your mind.

There are many resources out there to help you make these decisions and to make this transition as smooth and as easy as possible.  The fourth and final article will be the benefits of downsizing. 

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.

You’ve finally made the decision to downsize, but you are looking around at your present surroundings and wondering where to begin.  You’ve lived in your house for a long time, you’ve collected and saved a lot of things, and you have many memories.  The goal is to eliminate excess so you can finally make decisions on what to keep and take with you.  Think about how many plastic containers you’ve collected throughout the years, believing you needed all of them for leftovers.  Do you even have all the matching lids and bottoms?   Probably not. 

 The following four (4) steps can get you started:

1. Start with a room or an area in the room that has little or no sentimental value (getting rid of those extra plastic food storage containers may even be a good start).
2. Work in limited blocks of time.
3. Have supplies on hand, such as heavy duty trash bags or boxes and markers for labeling.
4. Develop a sorting process, making separate piles to keep like with like.

- Items to keep and use

- Items to give to family members or friends

- Items to sell or donate

- Items to discard

- Items to shred

- Items to recycle

 TIP:  Give yourself plenty of time overall.

It’s a good idea to allocate twice as much time on a project than you think.

The third article will be about making decisions.  More to come!

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.

You’ve lived in your house a long time.  You’ve accumulated lots of “stuff”.  Are you at that stage in your life where you are thinking about downsizing?  Are your parents or friends at that stage in their lives where they may be thinking about downsizing as well?  No matter how big your family is, you’re finally considering moving into something smaller because 1) you know it will be easier to maintain and 2) you’ll have more time to do the things you want to do.

Step I: To begin the overall process, you may want to ask yourself what your ultimate goal is.  Where, meaning location, do you want to live?  Once you’ve decided on that, you’ll want to consider whether:

• You want to have everything on one floor.
• You want to move into a smaller, single family home (in a 55+ plus community or not).
• You want a condo where certain things are taken care of for you (e.g., lawn maintenance, snow removal). 
• You’ll feel safer if you were in an independent or assisted living environment.
• You want to rent.

Step II: Now is the time to figure out what you are going to keep and take with you and what you are going to donate or sell.  This is very hard because there are a lot of emotions attached to things.  However, the process of making these decisions can even be started before you pick your new location.  By not waiting until the last minute, you can reduce your stress level as you can take your time making these choices.

Step III: Once you’ve decided where you are going to live, what you are taking with you to your new home, it’s time to pack, move, and unpack.  If you need help with any of your downsizing needs, please visit www.theupsidetodownsizing.com, the primary resource in assisting Baby Boomers and Seniors for all their downsizing needs.  Remember – LESS REALLY IS MORE!

The second article will be about getting started and eliminating the excess.    Stay tuned!

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.

Managing emails seems to be hard for many people, and I get asked a lot how to stay on top of the situation and not get overwhelmed.  We receive more than our fair share of emails every single day; it rivals snail mail.  This seems to be a very appropriate time for me to share these tips with all of you as I just finished cleaning out many months of emails in my Inbox, Sent Items file, and Deleted Items file.

My biggest suggestion is that you deal with emails on a regular basis.  You may want to handle your incoming emails several times a day, but you may not want and/or need to clean out your virtual files as often (weekly, biweekly, monthly, whatever works for you).  You want to make sure you maintain your Inbox, Sent and Deleted Items files, and virtual files before they become overwhelming and you can’t find anything.  Asking yourself some questions may help when deciding whether or not to keep emails.  Here are some examples.

• Do I need this email for legal or tax purposes?
• Under what situation would I need to refer to it again?
• Will the email help me with my business, any of my life’s goals, or whatever project on which I am working?
• What would happen if I got rid of it?

While I was working on my project, I would have loved to delete everything and start from scratch, but I knew I couldn’t do that.  I really kept asking myself what would actually happen if I couldn’t find a particular email, but at that point, I wasn’t at that stage (although I could have reached it in due time – LOL).

Initially, I sorted the From column in alphabetical order and deleted all the emails in my Inbox and Sent Items file that I knew right away I did not need or want anymore.  I use Outlook, and I have to manually delete what is in my Deleted Items file, but at least they were in a file waiting to be permanently deleted.   For those emails that I wanted to keep and review before deleting, I created virtual files, just like you create files for your hard copies of documents, and dragged and dropped emails into these files.  I used meaningful names, and finally, all I had to do was figure out which ones I really needed to keep and which ones I no longer needed.  Basically, I followed my own organizing process – putting like with like and then purging what I didn’t need or want. 

Some of you have emails that you have to act on but not necessarily at the time of reading them.  There are several schools of thought as to what to do with them.  My advice is to do what makes the most sense to you.  You can keep them in your Inbox and use your Inbox as an extension of your To Do List.   Color coding could help, but be careful, as this idea could potentially get out-of-hand.  You may want to create a To Do file and put the emails in there to act on them later, thereby keeping your Inbox as clean as possible.  Or, you may want to file them in one of your virtual files and know you must look in those folders to handle the To Do.  Whatever process you choose, make sure it works for you.  Periodically, these virtual files need to be cleaned out just like you do with your hard copy files.

So, now that I have my emails under control, these are the four (4) tips I am going to follow going forward:

1. Read.
2. Respond.
3. File or Delete.
4. Delete permanently if your email program doesn’t do this automatically.

As with anything that needs to be organized, you want to control the clutter, not have the clutter control you.  If you have another way of managing your emails, please let us know.  You never know who you may be able to help.

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077. 

When we think of July, we think of freedom and independence.  That is exactly what you deserve.  You are entitled to enjoy the longer days of summer.

It doesn’t matter whether you live in an apartment, condo, or single family house, you may still need to organize your outdoor items.   Stop spending extra time searching for gardening tools, lawn equipment, and/or outside furniture.   Sort like items with like items to help you find things easily. 

Gardening Tools

Place all your gardening tools in one area.  Set up some kind of potting station, so you’ll have all the pots, watering cans, potting soil, etc in one place.

Lawn Equipment

Make sure the lawn mower, edger, hoses, sprinklers, etc are all in one place (e.g., garage, shed).

Outside Furniture

Store in one area (e.g., garage, shed, basement) so it is easy to get to when you want to set it up and easy to have a place for it when it is ready to be stored.

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.

When you are digging through storage containers, drawers, shelves, etc, you are bound to find items that you no longer need, don’t necessarily want, but can’t give away because they bring back good memories.  (Hopefully, if the memories aren’t good, you can give the items away.)  It’s hard to make the decision to keep or not to keep the item because of the emotions attached to it.

I have a client who used to have long hair about 25 years ago, and she collected all different kinds of scrunchies.  For those of us who had long hair back then but don’t now, we can vividly remember all the things we used to pull our hair back.  While cleaning out a box in her garage, we found a bag of about 40 of these scrunchies. 

Of course, we talked about that time in her life.  I honestly was not sure what my client was going to do with them.  I was really hoping she would only keep one or two just for posterity.  But, we had a little ceremony, and she was able to discard all of them.  We knew we couldn’t donate them, and we weren’t sure how they could be reused (several of them had lost their elasticity).  The little saying for the ceremony went something like this:

They were good scrunchies.

They were worthy scrunchies.

Amen. 

We laughed, had fun, and were able to move on with de-cluttering and organizing project for that day.  So, if you are having difficulty letting go, maybe a little ceremony will help.  Just think, you can be creative, make up your own little saying, have fun, and laugh as well.  Try it.  It certainly can’t hurt.

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.

1.  Sort the mail into piles on a daily basis:

• Recycle.
• Shred.
• File right away (e.g., financial statements) – need to keep but don’t need to do anything with it.
• Handle at a later date (e.g., bills to be paid).
• Belongs to other family members.

2.  Have a recycle bucket or bag and/or shredder near where you are sorting so the mail that needs to be recycled and/or shredded gets put in that container right away. 

3.  Designate a regular place in your home to move the piles to where you will take care of them.

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.

To be able to reuse and repurpose can be very satisfying and rewarding!

I have a client who has a 4-year old son.  For one of his art projects, he decorated an off-white canvas tote with glitter, finger paints, etc.  My client, who likes to save her son’s art projects (what parent doesn’t?), had no idea what to do with this and was having a hard time making the decision to throw it out.  It was fairly bulky and seemed to be taking up valuable real estate in the closet. 

She watches children in her home, and our first project together was to de-clutter and organize her coat closet on the 1^st floor.  This closet was and is used for some of her family’s items, as well as many of the art supplies, games, books, etc she uses for her business.  After we sorted and purged, we knew what we needed to keep in the closet.  Paint brushes and paints comprised one art category.  What we decided to do was to use the tote her son made to hold all these paint supplies.  The tote was big enough to house them, and they were all together (keeping like with like) so my client realized what she actually had.  This also made her job easier when she had to pull the paint supplies out to use them and to put them away when the children were finished painting. 

This was definitely a win-win situation.  My client was able to:

1. Save money by using an existing container (one that had sentimental value attached to it).
2. Save money by not having to buy additional supplies because she found she had enough for the time being.
3. Save time by having easy access to the items.
4. Be sustainable by not adding to the landfills.

Please share some de-cluttering and organizing success stories you’ve had.  We’d love to hear them.  We’ll continue to post more as well. 

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077. 

Are you juggling a lot right now?  School is ending, vacations are being planned, gardens are being cultivated, and day-to-day activities and tasks must still be maintained.  Here are some time management tips for a busy time of the year.   

1. Schedule time to organize. 
2. Write it on your calendar just like you would any other appointment.
3. If you can’t organize for a longer period of time, use a timer for at least 15 to 30 minutes. 
4. Allow for interruptions; allocate twice as much time for a project.
5. Pick a time during the day when you have the most energy and use that time for those projects that take a lot of effort. 
6. Put on some music and have fun!

If you have some other time management tips that work for you, please share them.  We all could use more tips like these to get and keep us organized.  Thanks.   

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.

I love success stories, so I thought I’d share this one with you.  I first started working with a client about 1 ½ years ago.  She initially contacted me several months after her father died to help dispose of his belongings.  We did not need 1 ½ years for that project, however, because our relationship developed into a trusting and productive one, we continued.

After we tackled her father’s belongings, we went on to other projects in the house.   The first was the living room.  When I initially went to her house, her living room was completely filled with her clothes – racks and rack of clothes that blocked getting to the dining room, kitchen,  bathroom, and 2 other bedrooms.  By following an “SPCA” (sort, purge, containerize, assign a home) process and after many sessions, we were able to go through all the clothing in the living room, as well as clothes throughout the rest of the house, and determine what should be kept and hung up in the walk-in closet in her late father’s room, what should be donated, and what could actually be discarded.  Then, we dismantled all the temporary racks that had been set up in the living room and recycled all the metal.  To this day, the living room is clear of clothing racks, and we can walk through that room to get to the other parts of the house.  In fact, we’ve gone through the walk-in closet again and purged more clothing.  Goodwill and The Women’s Opportunity Center have been the recipients of my client’s clothes. 

Please share some de-cluttering and organizing success stories you’ve had.  We’d love to hear them.  We’ll post more as well.

BB’s Clutter Solutions is located in Cherry Hill, NJ and serves New Jersey (north and south), Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs, and New York City.  Contact information: www.bb-clutter-solutions.com, info@bb-clutter-solutions.com, 856-912-0077.