3 HUGE mistakes you need to avoid for a cleaner home

Does this sound familiar? You start to look around and notice things are getting a little messy. You hide when the doorbell rings, papers, trinkets and little bits of clutter cover almost every surface. You might even feel anxious a lot of the time. You go, OK, I'm going to clean up this house. And then you realize there's a lot of stuff. And yet it has been months or years and you're not making any progress or much progress. And you might even worry that it will never be clean and organized. I understand this because I have been there. Just look at this basement. And I'm a minimalist light person, but I still fall into a few traps. And clearly I need to get on top of a couple of things. You may have seen this in a recent tour of my house, and I showed a couple of things that have fallen by the wayside. I want to tell you three decluttering mistakes that you and I should both be tackling, and you can get that tidy, clean and decluttered home that feels peaceful and relaxed. Before I tell you about the traps, I want to let you know I am actually going to be decluttering my whole house in October. And I am inviting you to join me. I'm just going to be posting some videos on YouTube for the month of October. There's going to be some other people joining. I'm going to have like a playlist. My plan is just to go around and declutter every spot for maybe five to 30 minutes a day. You make your own rules and I will post a video every week. So I'm inviting you to join me. Make sure you're subscribed so you never miss a video. OK, let's get into that first mistake. Now, when I get motivated and excited to do something, I can jump all in. I just get so excited. So let's use my messy basement, which I will show you more of in a second as an example. I was kind of like me about the whole thing, and I just would be like, oh, I'll get to it later. I'll get to it later. But then we put on my new storage shelves and I was all in. I would have to hold myself back from doing this when I had other chores and commitments. But then I start getting bored. So the new novel and fun part is over. So then I lose interest and I stop and I'm worried. Will things stay messy forever? And one of the things is sometimes I feel like we need to just like harness that excitement and just like do it. But that can be a challenge. Mistake one is going all in at the beginning and then getting bored. It's almost like sprinting versus a marathon, except you actually didn't really want to run a marathon anyway. Got to get ready to run that marathon. Oh, lasagna. Exactly. Yet you need to find something to keep you motivated to keep running that race. We need something or somebody to keep us accountable. Having an accountability buddy is the best way to do that, in my opinion. So let me and the other creators taking part in that challenge help you stay accountable on YouTube this October. And you can help me stay accountable to get that clean home. So let me explain my basement. OK, so first of all, I have been trying to have a bit of food storage. Plus, I just discovered canning about three years ago and I have my garden, all the things. However, I will can something and then I will. I used to just leave it upstairs, but now I will bring it down. But then I was running out of storage. Things were getting kind of chaotic. Now, storage is not usually the solution. However, when it is something important that needs to be stored like food, because I do truly believe that everybody should have a little bit like if you think back to during the pandemic, everybody was like freaking out because there was not enough stuff. So I want to have a little bit, not to mention like the money savings. I think it's healthier to have like some of these like homegrown things that are at the ready for meals. However, there we needed an adequate way to store it. So I've got these shelves I just got and I need to organize them. And I'm so excited because I'm going to do that. OK, so the second mistake, it might feel very familiar. I don't know about you, but so often I plan to get stuff done. But then something else comes up. I have three kids, two of them live here. My eldest is at university and I miss him so much. And just when life is busy, he's only in Vancouver and I'm on Vancouver Island. So it's like an hour and a half, two hour ferry ride. He will come home, which I love because I miss him so much. But it's a lot like it's it's just a lot. Right. And we also foster kittens in the summer. And that means vet appointments, pickups, drop offs, lots of snuggles. I also have a huge garden. I have my business. I work the odd nursing shift, et cetera, et cetera. And that's just my life. Like, honestly, you have stuff in your life, too. And I am often talking to women who are over age 40. And whether you can relate to my stuff or maybe you're retired and you're busy volunteering or whatever, you're still involved. We can find life totally overwhelming. Even if you don't have a super busy life, if there's a task that we don't feel like doing, maybe cleaning or decluttering, it will slip lower and lower down the priority list. And before you know it, five years have gone by. Your home is no better off. You're frustrated by the files of National Geographic. Mistake two is not making it a priority and ensuring that there is time to actually get it done. And this is why I schedule stuff in. I am just saying this challenge will be great because the goal is to do it every day. Just saying I use my planner and this helps me never forget anything because it's in there. And I talk about my planner all the time and people will say, well, I lose my planner and I get that. I used to lose it all the time, but I use it so much. I literally carry it from room to room. Actually, that's not true. It basically is in my office or it's in the living room. Occasionally it makes it to my bedroom. So maybe just try to keep it to a couple of rooms. But for me, it's in one of those two spots. And if you're on a livestream with me, I'll always be like, oh, I don't have my planner here. I will link my favorites below, but I find my planner very, very helpful. I may have never mentioned this before, but I also have a terrible memory and my husband's memory is worse. I have ADHD. I completely lose track of time and priorities all the time unless I write it down. So this helps me get those things that I need to get done. Yeah, let's take a little intermission. You can just watch me go ahead and work and organize and declutter this space while I explain to you real quick. So like I said, it is so handy to have a friend and just say like, hey, I'm going to run down and I'm going to like declutter the basement or hop on the Facebook group or I have my group coaching or one on one programs where we really rely on accountability. And it's really handy. And of course, like having a plan, scheduling things in is my very favorite thing in the world to do to get things done, because if I don't schedule it, it's not going to get done. However, another great thing that I like to do is if I know I'm going to be decluttering a space and maybe I'm not getting it to adjust yet, if I go in there and I did this with my closet, too, is I will be aware of what I am. I'll be like, OK, I'm definitely not going to be keeping that. I'm not going to be keeping that. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And I mean, you might be the type of person where you go ahead and you pull that stuff out right away, which, you know, good for you. But for me, instead, I know I'm going to get it done. What I will do instead of doing that right away is just know how I'm going to do it. So with this basement pantry, for example, I knew what I was going to do. I knew that I wanted to get these shelves filled with my beautiful canning stuff, which is honestly so, so fun. And I knew, which you'll see in a minute, that I was going to take the stuff from behind, like where all the Lego was. I was going to take that food and put it on the other shelf. And oh, my gosh, just you wait until you see the after. I just every time I go down there, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I love it. But anyway, it's just great to have an idea of what you want to do. And then like when you are decluttering a space, I find it is really, really helpful to just be like, hey, this is how I'm probably going to organize it. And I know not everybody has that sort of capacity to know how they're going to do something. And I just knew I was going to put the canning stuff on that one wire one and then the other sort of like more commercially purchased stuff on the existing gray shelf. And then this one I was just going to declutter, clean up, grab any of the garbage and just sort of knowing ahead of time sort of like what the game plan was. And even when if you're a planner user like me, or even if you're more of a list maker or you just do things mentally in your head, I think it is so handy even just to jot down a couple of things so that you remember, because like I said, my memory is so bad. I really will just forget something, even if I'm like, this is so obvious. I will never forget this. And then I do. So that is that's sort of how I put a lot of the stuff into practice. Now, stay tuned for the after. Now, the next one is a lot more common than I realized. Do you ever want to start something new or just to do anything? And then you think, OK, I'm going to do this right. You want the right method, the right donation places, the boxes, etc. And you start watching videos and you start reading books. I'm looking at blogs and I mean, I love these things. They're all very helpful. I get it. I like it, too. But the problem is, this is another form of procrastination. And too much of a good thing is too much, right? And it can stop us from starting and it can keep us stuck in that mess and clutter. Here is my very best technique to tackle it. Do the research. Totally do the research. But just limit yourself for maybe just an hour, a day, something short. And you might not even realize that it's happening when you are inspired and you end up just like going down a YouTube rabbit hole, which I mean, I love. I do it. Hey, like I'm on YouTube. So just stop yourself when you notice it and just say, I'm going to limit myself. Funny story, I had not filmed this, so I had to interrupt my husband and my son when they were watching a movie. Look how great this looks. Oh, and I'm just going to pretend like the rest of the room is clean, but it's not. But it looks so much better. Oh, my gosh. Yay! Coupled with scheduling things in and having an accountability partner, you can be decluttered in no time, say by the end of October. Your home will be ready for the holidays, especially if you avoid these mistakes. And what about where to start or the questions to ask? This can be totally overwhelming, too. And it can stop us in our perfectionism and procrastination tracks. They're important. You need to figure it out, but just don't spend very long. Got you covered right here with this video about how to declutter from start to finish. Stay tidy and mighty. I hope something great happens for you today. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time. Bye!