← Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast
Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast
Your House Shouldn’t Be a Part-Time Job: Here’s How to Make It Work for You | Clutterbug Podcast # 275
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I talk a lot on this podcast about getting more done and making yourself proud and like being productive. But what if to really get there, it's not about doing more, but it's all about less. We're going to talk about burnout and how you can make your home burnout. Proof in today's podcast. Hey Clutterbugs, welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. Just like always, I'm really going to encourage, encourage you while you're listening. Today we're just going to have a conversation. Hopefully I can inspire and motivate you and make you just rethink your home in a different and new way. But I also want you to feel really proud of yourself and have something checked off your list. I would recommend letting go, having less, filling a trash bag or filling a box of donations that can go getting one of your many, many gift bags that you've stored somewhere in your house and filling it with gifts that can donate to your local thrift store. It's a good way of reframing, donating to think of them as gifts. But every time you have less stuff, your life will be easier. It just is. And we're going to talk a little bit about that in today's podcast, but other ways too, that we can look at our house a little bit differently. Not like, how can I get more of this stuff done, but how can I make it easier, period, to take care of? How can I have my home make me feel recharged and refreshed and not be another thing on my to do list? I think one of the most exhausting parts about my home, everyone's home, is the invisible work, the invisible labor that is the things that it's basically filling our mind and making us feel exhausted and wore out. It's things like, do we have enough toilet paper? What's for dinner? We when's the last time we cleaned out the fridge? We have to remember when it's garbage day and recycling. And if you have a cluttered home, this is magnified beyond what you could possibly imagine. And I almost forget what this is like until I go back and help a client or help someone declutter and organize their home and I'm back in their space when it's really, really messy. They have way too much inventory, way too much stuff, and I start to have the same physical and emotional effects just being in that space. It's more than just the mess stresses you out. The mess takes your time. The mess adds to your Invisible labor. And I'm going to give you an example. Last week, I was in Seattle and I was helping Jessica McCabe. She's a YouTuber that I've been a really big fan of for a long time. She has a channel, how to adhd, that. When I was first diagnosed with adhd, I really. I was just so grateful for her and all of her education and information. It made me feel like, one, I wasn't alone, and two, I learned real tools to help me manage the chaos in my brain. So when I met her at the first ever neurodiversion ADHD conference, she said to me, I really need your help. She had a lot of her followers say, you need to reach out to Clutterbug and do a collab. And I had reached out to her in the past and not heard anything back, but we were in person and we were talking, and she was like, please, could you help me? I feel like I'm drowning. She had a new baby. She had a partner move in. She wrote a book, all within the last two years, and she said she was drowning. She sent me a video walkthrough of her space, and I was on the verge of tears just watching her talk about her home. And it wasn't that she was complaining. It wasn't that she, you know, was. Was giving me a sob story. I just could see the stress. I could see the. The joy. Every time she walked into another space, I could see the joy being just sucked out of her. And she was trying to look at the positive and point out the things she loved, but. But I could see the burden that her home was. So Joe and I literally jumped on a plane, flew to Seattle. We didn't even really have a plan. I was just like, she has helped me so much. I have to help her too. And we showed up at her home, and I was there for three days. And let me tell you, it was. I mean, I don't even know how to describe it. Um, it was a wonderful and emotional because we were able to help her and declutter and organize. But when I was in the space, I lost my phone about 30 times a day. We couldn't find the screws for the furniture that we were building. We. We ordered lunch the first day and couldn't find a flat surface to eat on. And we're just, like, stuff shuffling things around. I. It. We couldn't. We didn't have a place to put dirty dishes down because there was no place. Everything took 10 times longer than it should have because there was so much stuff everywhere. And to see Jessica completely stressed out in and not even realizing, like, the correlation, I don't think, between the clutter and. And the amount of stress and the amount of time that she was spending, she just kept saying, I don't have time to do anything. I'm so busy. And I knew that the majority of her time being spent wasn't being a mother or even work. It was managing the mess of the home, trying to find her keys, her wallet, her purse, the diapers, the leash to take the dog for a walk. All of these things were adding up to hours in a day. She. Every day she said she was late getting out the door. And every day when she came home, it took like an hour longer than she thought it would to even just feed her baby and get dinner on the table and get her to bed. Like, everything was delayed. Everything was more complicated. Everything was harder than it needed to be. And Jessica is not alone. That may be an extreme case because she does have adhd. So it's compounded, but the fact that she had excess. And let's add to that, there wasn't systems in place to catch her at her busiest, at her worst, at her most distracted. Her home didn't have any systems. It didn't have a place, a drop zone for when she came in the door. It didn't have a place for coats and shoes that was easy and convenient and clear to just get to. She had to push things out of the way to get to a closet where it was full of hangers, which doesn't even work for her brain. So most of the coats and shoes just ended up on the floor, the back of a chair, or on a railing. It wasn't just the entrance way. There wasn't a place for bills that need to be paid that was consistent. There wasn't even a consistent place for the keys to go. It was somewhere on this surface. The kitchen table just caught everything. Because none of this stuff had a clearly defined home. And you couldn't even really create a clearly defined home because of the amount of excess. This isn't just something I see with Jessica. This is something that I see with every home that I visit. I just went to Lisa's craft room, and same story. She wasn't. She was so overwhelmed in the space, and it took so long to clear a surface to craft, and then she'd have to take so long to clean up after she made anything because it wasn't quick and easy to put anything away or to find anything that it Felt like what should be a. I'm gonna spe half an hour and just make something small for fun is now a half a day affair. And so there was real reluctance to actually engage and actually craft and actually do something that made her really happy because her home was over, complicating everything because there was all this invisible labor, which is magnified in mess because now we're not just talking about remembering to take out the trash or remembering to put away the laundry or that you need to buy toilet paper, but. And now it's remembering where I put my stuff. Where are my keys? Where's my wallet? Where's that extra shoe? Where's the. The note I have to sign for my child's classroom? Where's the permission slip? Where do these memories go? Where's the rice? In a cabinet that's so stuffed you can't see it when you first open it and you're making dinner. So much more invisible work. Invisible labor that is added when you don't have an organized home, when you don't have a. A decluttered, highly decluttered home. And we're not talking about minimalism. This is not what it is. But I'm going to be totally honest, and I use this same analogy that I did with Jessica, and I hope it resonates with you because I. I saw that it really got through to her. Your home is a container. And I want you to imagine it like a jar, and you're putting marbles in it. Your stuff is the marbles. And so we start out, we're just like collecting marbles. They're shiny, they're pretty. There's marbles we need to use on a daily basis. But. But very quickly our jar of marbles becomes full. But we're continually. We're still adding marbles to it all the time. We're getting new things. It's Christmas. Or maybe we're just out and we're picking something up. Or maybe it's things that we actually need to use, like food. But we're adding marbles. We're adding. We're adding. But now they're kind of overflowing on the jar. So now what do we have to do? We have to take time and stack them really neatly and, and really meticulously. We have to stack them slowly because if we don't, if we just plop it on, they all come crashing and fall and overflow all over. And. And it's still. Even though we stack it neatly, it's still spilling over. And now we're spending time not just putting in new marbles, but picking up other marbles to try to constantly put them back in while adding more and adding more. And here's what the average person does. They think, I just need a bigger jar, right? We need a bigger house. Or they start getting, like, other little jars to put the spillage over. So they add a shed or they rent a storage locker. When what we really need to do is remove the marbles that we don't use and love and just constantly keep it at a constant. We are always bringing stuff in, and if we're not getting stuff out at the same rate, we are overflowing our home. And if you haven't decluttered In a year, two years, 10 years, there's people who haven't decluttered in a decade. And I'm not just talking, like, throwing out the trash of, like, the occasional little declutter. I'm talking about big, bad, massive amounts of stuff leaving your home. If you're not doing that, of course, your jar is full and overflowing, and the only way to knock it down is to drastically remove a ridiculous amount of marbles. And that metaphor really helped Jessica because as we were decluttering on the first day and going through, and she would pick up something, everything, you know, she's like, oh, I like this. It could be, ooh, I could turn this into something. She was. She caught herself and said, oh, this is just a shiny marble. I love shiny marbles, but my jar is full. I really can only keep the brightest, the most beautiful marbles and the ones that are really useful. These other ones, though, they're pretty, and I like them. I don't have room. And that analogy really helped her look at her house differently and start letting go. So that's. That's the first step on how to, like, burnout proof your home is stop picking up marbles off the floor. Man, you gotta. You gotta get down to amount that easily fits in your home so that you can put things away quickly. When your drawers are stuffed, when your cabinets are stuffed, when your closets are stuffed, you can't quickly put something away. You have to stop and take time to shove it, to cram it, to line it all up so that everything actually fits. And all of these little few seconds that you keep adding to shove stuff out of the way to open the closet door, what are you doing? This is all adding up to invisible labor and visual labor, too. It's adding up to unnecessary work, and you don't realize how much this is taking from your day. It's not even about the fact that it's making you miserable in your home. You don't have time for this because at the end of the day, you're going to feel exhausted. You're going to feel like, oh, my gosh, I was working all day. And yet what did you actually get done? Not nothing. You just lived your life. You didn't push the needle forward. You just got through your day. But it took you 10 times longer to get through your day than all the other people who have an organized, clutter free home. You're not. You're not giving yourself space to grow and do cooler things. And. And you look at other people and you might be like, how doing this. How are they possibly getting it all done? Babes, you're spending an extra five hours a day that they don't have to. That's the difference. Imagine if you had an extra five hours in your day. What could you do? And that's what decluttering and having a functional, organized home can give you. So decluttering is the first step. And what this looks like is, is not tidying. Decluttering is not tidying. Decluttering is not cleaning. Decluttering is not organizing. Decluttering is removing things from your home forever. It's filling bags and boxes. And the only way to really do this is to look in your space, to touch everything and make a decision on it. Do not just open the closet and say, well, these are where my clothes go. I wear clothes. I guess I'm keeping all of this. That's that. We can't declutter like that. We can't look at a closet and be able to say, okay, these things have to go. We have to pull out each shirt and say, do I love this shirt? Do I wear this shirt? Yes. Okay, let's put it back. Let's pull out a different thing. We don't look at whole spaces. We look at each individual item. And we might say, we don't have time for that cast. But here's what I'm telling you. You do. Because I spent six hours with Jessica and her and her partner, her fiance, decluttering. And I have gotten texts from her every day since that she's making it out the door on time, she's no longer late. She has so much time at the end of the day. Yes, we spent six hours decluttering, but she's gaining back at least an hour a day. Once we've decluttered, the next thing that we can do to really make our house burnout free is design our day for energy, not output. So really look at the tasks that drain you instead of looking at all the things that you have to do. Like, what do you spend the most time on in your home? And what is, like, a suck for you? Does that make sense? Like, what task is just eating away your time? And I did this when I first started my organizing journey. I really just audited, I guess, how much time I spent doing all these different household activities. I definitely spent more time than I ever realized looking for things. But even outside of that, I used to fold all my clothes because I thought that's what you had to do. So putting away laundry, like, doing laundry was an insane time suck for me. In my family, I had two little girls, and I would fold their onesies and have to pair their socks and. And just. Oh, my gosh, Joe and I. I did Joe's clothes too. And it was such a huge amount of time that I spent doing that. Another thing that I spent an obnoxious amount of time on was cooking. Because I grew up in. In a household where dinners were a thing. We had mashed potatoes and gravy and roast beef and a vegetable and sometimes a salad. Sometimes we had fresh bread like my mom loved. I felt this expectation as a mother that dinners had to be this big, elaborate thing. So I spent a lot of time cooking, and then I also spent a lot of time picking up and tidying. And those were my three. My. In my home, my big three energy suckers, drainers, time suckers. So it wasn't just looking at it, like, all the things I have to do. I was really identifying the. The big and the bad and the ugliest. And then I looked at it as. Instead of just, I gotta get this done, how can I make this less of a suck? And that's when I started giving up folding. And I'm not suggesting that you give up folding, but for me, the freedom of taking a basket out of the dryer of clothes, going into the room, and just tossing the things away. I hang the shirts that I don't want to get wrinkled, But I have all the hangers together, so it's really fast and easy. I don't sit in front of the TV and fold because then going to the space and putting away is like, I've got the time suck of sticking, sitting, and folding in front of the tv, but then I've got this other time suck of putting it away later. Now it's like three minutes and the laundry is done and it's off my list. And if I want to sit and watch tv, I can either do something else or just sit and enjoy relaxing and, and watching tv. I've saved my time. So I, I don't fold. I drastically reduced the amount of clothes that I had so it was faster and easy to put it away. And I just changed the way I did laundry. So I focused more on just done is better than doing it. Great. How can I take a shortcut here? And how can I eliminate this big energy suck from my plate and make it as fast and easy as possible? Dinner is the same thing. Like we, I started introducing leftover night. I started having, we're just having soup and sandwiches. I had PA late night, I had Friday night pizza. I, I cut my cooking down to like a quarter of the time I was spending. And then the tidying. I started using really big baskets with no lids so I could chuck things away like basketballs. I started adding labels everywhere. And I started introducing these quick tidy up times throughout the day that my whole family would do instead of waiting till Saturday and having to spend three hours tidying before I could actually clean. And I never actually got to the cleaning because I was so t from the tidying. Instead of that, I set up my house so that it was really easy to put things away super quick. And everything had a clearly defined home. And not just defined, but like a basket to keep it from spreading every category, every toy, every everything. And these were just cheap dish pans from the dollar store. And I like would label them with tape and write on it with a marker. But that burnout proofed my home because when we did these little tidy up times, it was really quick to put things away. We could literally throw it into the basket, like just chuck it fast, fast, fast, fast. The kids could get involved too, even though they were little toddlers. And I no longer had this huge burden on the weekends of this big energy sucking tidy time. So taking an inventory and I want you to think about your life right now in your home. What are spending the most of your time on? What is your big energy suck? What is your big time suck? And how can you redesign those? Create new systems for those to cut that in half, to give you up, to give you more time in your day. Look at it differently. Not just as an output, not just as a task that has to be done. But realize that you can think of creative ways to make this less work for you, less time and less of an energy suck. So I would audit I would absolutely 100% think of auditing the amount of time you spend on your home and really identifying the big, bad, ugly things. The third thing that I recommend, nobody wants to hear. I guess it kind of goes along with all of these, but it's really letting go of the expectations of perfection and what you think your home is supposed to look like and what organizing is supposed to look like and what systems are supposed to look like and just embracing. Good enough. I'm going to use Jessica as another example because it's fresh in my mind because I was just there. This is an extreme example, and I don't mean to throw her under the bus, but let's just get real. Let's talk about it. While she was giving me a virtual tour of her home, she went into her bedroom and the dresser was full, like, piled high with folded clothes. And there was baskets of folded clothes all on the floor and all around. And she said, oh, I hate the laundry and I gotta put this away. But I hire someone to help me, and they fold the clothes, but they don't fold the clothes the way I like it. So I have to find time to refold all this clothes before I can put it away. It's such a typical perfectionist mindset. You can't even see the floor in her bedroom. Everything is a disaster. Her ev, the whole house is trashed. But she wants to refold folded, clean clothes so that it's done in the way that she likes it. And she read the book the Magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondo, and she started Marie Kondo folding her clothes. And she loves it and she enjoys it, and it makes her feel proud. And she does that. But she does that maybe once a month. She'll spend time to do a little bit of that. She cannot. She does not have the energy. She doesn't have the time. She doesn't have the stamina. She is too burnt out to fold her clothes like that on a regular basis. So she waits until she can do it right later. And maybe listening to this example, you're like, well, that's extreme. And I'm not like that. But I guarantee there's things that you are doing that are just as bonkadox. I guarantee you are waiting to do your paperwork. You are waiting to set up a system for your craft supplies. You are waiting to clear out that spare bedroom. You are waiting to do the garage until you have the time to do it in the way that you've envisioned, that it needs to be done till you have the money to buy the shelving till you have the money to do this, till you have a babysitter to watch the kids, till you have a whole week off from work that you can dedicate it to just getting it all done. This is a common issue, this perfectionist mindset. Instead of just saying done is better than perfect. Done today, done crappy. I don't want to say the S word, but listen. Done. S word. S, H, I, T, T, Y is so much better. Is so much better. You can always go back and make it perfect later. But let's get it off your to do list. Now throw those clothes in the drawers. You know you got kids toys. Get some dollar store dish pans. Make one for each thing, put some tape on it, throw them in. I don't care if the bins are lined up on the floor, you'll get shelving one day. We don't just leave the pile. Create the homes. If you. Jessica is another example. She's like, I want to hang up all. I. I should. This is what she said. I should be hanging up my coats in this cabinet at the end of the hall. But I just have this coat rack. For now. I'm just tossing things on because I just don't have the capacity every day to put things on a hanger. Yeah. She's like, when I do have find time and I do have the energy, I'll take everything off the coat rack and I'll reset my landing. And I'm like, that's bonkers. But guess what? The coat rack's also not working because now it's just like a doom coat rack and you have to take coats off to find the coat you want. And it's overflowing and it falls over all the time because it's so heavy and it's nuts. What if we just throw up some heavy duty 3m hooks for now inside the cabinet? You're not going to use a hanger and that's fine. But now you only have to like open the cabinet door and boop. And. But now everything's jammed. It's like you can hang a bunch of hooks inside there and think of like a lazy system. Give yourself permission to have a lazy system. She said, one day I'm gonna have this cute little coat. No, this cute little key rack that I bought and I'm gonna find a special place for it. And that's where my keys are gonna go. And I'm like, I'm just gonna plop a 3M hook right on the wall. Right here where you naturally put it down. That's where your key's going. And we're moving on. And it isn't perfect. And maybe, maybe it'll fall off the wall, you know, but maybe you'll find the time one day to find that cool key hook that you bought and actually install it properly. But in the meantime, it still needs a place to go that's good enough. So we're throwing up a 3m hook. We're giving you a basket to kick your shoes into. Whatever. Maybe you want this fancy shoe system from ikea, or maybe you want a fancy shoe shelving in your closet one day, but you don't have the money and you don't have the time right now, and that's okay. So we're kicking them into a basket because it's better than a pile on the floor that you keep tripping on. We've got to just embrace this quick, easy, dirty. Good enough. We have to. We can always go back and make it perfect later. Because when you keep putting off setting up systems like this and creating good enough homes, you're just left in this limbo. You're left in this limbo of like, chaos until you can do it right later. So while you're listening again, I hope you're kicking butt on something on your house and you're getting stuff done and you're filling baskets and you're like, because tomorrow's going to be easier because of the work you're putting in today. Not just tomorrow, but every day after is going to be easier. But I also hope you're thinking about I. The. The places you keep picking up, the places that don't stay tidy. The places where you're really struggling and think, what's something that's like, good enough that I can do with the stuff I have right now or just like one trip to the dollar store. What system can I create right now? Can I just have a basket for bills that have to be paid, need and where is that going to go? And can I label it? And can I start every day doing like a. When I do my tidy up, putting the bills in there, putting the bills in there and then setting an alarm on Sunday to actually empty it and pay the bills every Sunday, a reoccurring alarm. Maybe you want to, I don't know, have some elaborate other filing system. Whatever perfection is, stop it. What crappy thing can you do today? So at least it's, it's done. At least it's done ish. So that you can move On. Before we talk about two more things that you can do to create this, this simplified burnout proof home, I have to thank today's podcast sponsor, Caraway. Recently I got some new cookware that has definitely made cooking easier. Why? Because all of my caraway cookware, not only is it beautiful, heavy duty, heats up fast, but it's super duper easy to clean. I also love that it's non toxic. So I used to have teflon pans, but then I read that when you scratch a Teflon pan, it releases so much microplastic and toxins into the food. Treating myself to caraway means it's fast, it's easy to cook, everything cooks evenly and it's so much easier to clean. Plus I get the added benefit of knowing that it's really toxic free cookware. If you want to give their iconic cookware set a try, it comes with a saute pan, a fry pan, a dutch oven, and a saucepan can. Plus lids for all of them and a lid holder for storage to keep it tidy. Right now, if you visit Caraway.com clutterbug you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. So visit CarawayHome.com clutterbug and use the code clutterbug at checkout. Remember, Caraway is non toxic cookware made modern. The next thing that I recommend to really create a burnout free home is to embrace the power of mini resets. This changed my life for a couple of reasons. One, it just gives you that like little boost that you need so that your house never becomes out of control. Think about your phone battery. When I think about my house having a phone battery, I used to wait till it was like at zero before I recharged it. So what I mean by that is I used to wait till my house was totally a mess, like on the weekend. And then I would do a, a big reset and I would clean a whole room or I'd clean everything. And I just take hours and hours and hours and hours to catch back up. It's like waiting till your phone's on zero to recharge it. But then I started doing these little power mini resets, maybe five minutes. I like to do a 15 minute before I go to bed. But I also sometimes just do a one minute, like a quick one. And at first I had to set timers and reminders to remind myself to do this because I was in the habit of waiting till things were insane before I tidied it up. But I would have these tidy alarms going and they were annoying, and sometimes I would snooze them. But a lot of the times I made myself actually do these quick tidy ups. And it was like just giving my phone a little recharge. It was giving my home a little recharge before it got to zero. It was making it so it never got to zero. And it was never perfect and it was never, you know, all the way reset, but it was manageable every day, all day. It never got crazy. But the other thing that happened was these little mini resets of me throughout the day, consistently just picking this up and putting it back, picking this up and putting it in its home. Picking this up and putting it in its home. It started training my brain to do it without the alarms. So when I was done with something, because I was so used to picking it up and putting it away, now it was just. Just like it was in my hand and I was just naturally putting it away. I went from being a person who was naturally messy my entire life to training myself to being a tidy person, to picking up after myself as I went. And not just me, my entire family, too. So my kids, my husband, we all, for the most part, just put things away when we're done with them. We're not always so great at putting the dishes in the dishwasher, let me tell you. That's something we still need to work on. But. But everything else that we use, it's just going away when we're done. And this isn't through nagging. This isn't through, like some sort of punishment or anything. It is literally through these tiny little resets, these power resets, and. And making. Doing them consistently trained us through muscle memory to now just put things away without thinking. It also was important that we had, in a way, for these to go that was fast and easy because we don't have a huge amount of excess. And everything has a home that's clearly labeled, that's quick and easy, that doesn't have a lid, it's either a hook or a basket. I'm even like, I'm here at my desk, I can open the drawer and I have all these little drawer dividers, so I just, like, chuck it in and it goes into a home and doesn't mix up with other things. So whether it's food, you know, all the pasta has a basket, all the rice, everything has a place where we can chuck it in fast, but it doesn't get mixed up, which means it's really easy to find things the next time we need it. It just as easy to put it away as it is to put it down. And we've trained ourselves to put it away before we ever even put it down now. And that is the power of these little mini recharges, these little mini resets. And I definitely recommend that you try this. And the last thing, the last thing that I want to talk about, I think it's also so, so important. And I'm going to use Jessica's home again as an example, is building a nurturing home identity. And that's just like a fancy way of saying giving each room a purpose that reflects you and your family and making it feel like that purpose. So walking into Jessica's home, she has a four story townhome. So every floor there's stairs to go up and down. It was crazy. My legs hurt so bad at the end of three days. But every floor kind of didn't have its own purpose and zone. It felt sort of unloved. It felt like, what is the story of this home trying to tell me, I don't know, that people are just surviving in here. And when I took her and her fiance and we stepped back and we said, like, what is your dream for this floor? So walking into her first home, she had like what should have been a little living room. There was a pull down projector and there was one tiny sofa and just clutter everywhere else. This is where they watched tv. This is where they played video games sometimes, but nothing else. And when I said, what should this room be? Both of them were like, I guess it should be, I don't know, it should feel like home. That's what they kept saying. But what does home feel like to you? And that's when Jessica said, said it should be a place that we could do our hobbies. And when I said, what are your hobbies? They said music. Both of them play guitar. Jessica played the flute and the ukulele. They play piano. None of that was in this space. There was a piano upstairs. There was a guitar in a, in an office. There was a flute in a closet. There was just. This should be a music room. What else do you love to do? What else is, is something that you want your home like to do in your home and love in your home. They both said board games at the same time. They're huge board game nerds. They love playing board games. There wasn't one board game in this space. The board games were stored in the garage. Doesn't make any sense. Their home wasn't reflecting their identity and they weren't nurturing their identity in the home. It wasn't a reflection of their passions. It wasn't a reflections of. Of them and their love and. And how they want to spend time together. Jessica had done a lot of artwork, and it was shoved in a closet in the office. It should have been hung here to remind her of her love of painting. And so in this space, I didn't organize really, really anything at all. I moved in board games. I moved out things that didn't represent this identity and what this. This room's purpose was. I hung some musical instruments on the wall so they saw them. So it was a reminder that this is a room for play. I added board games, I hung artwork, and that's it. And guess what I got. They walked in this space and burst into tears and said, we have a home. Nothing in this space had really changed except decluttering and featuring the identity of this room and this space to reflect them and the things that they loved. Think about your own home. Think about your living room. Think about your bedroom. Think about if you have a craft room or an office. Does it reflect you and your identity and what you want this purpose of this room to be? If you're in your family room and you're like, this is where I want all my family to come together and spend time together, do you have family photos in that room? Do you have board games? Do you have activities that you like to do as a family in this space? Does the space reflect what you wish it would be? And that is an easy thing to remedy. If the answer is no, you're doing a little bit of switching around, a little bit of decluttering. You're bringing in the identity, you're nurturing that you're creating that. So you're seeing, and it's reflecting back to you. Because this is the really amazing, cool thing that happens. When you love a space, you're way more likely to take care of it. When you love a space, when it is a reflection of you, when you are proud of it, when it inspires you to play and enjoy it, you're way more likely to take care of it subconsciously without even realizing. We're decorating and organizing for comfort, for the activities you do, not for show. This isn't about what it looks like. This is about what it's saying to you. Your kitchen, is this a place where you want to have everybody together to eat? Is this a place where you love to cook and create or bake? Do you have a baking station? Do you have A cooking station? Does it reflect and nurture your dream for the space? And if not, what's going to go to make room? How are you going to redesign? What are you going to. What are you going to rearrange to make it so that it does in your bedrooms? The same way if your bedroom is like, you want it to be a retreat and it's supposed to be where you just, like, reconnect with your partner, do you have stacks of laundry in there and work? Do you have a home office in there? Is there another place that you can put that stuff? Rearrange it? How can you. How can you make your home feel like a home? I can't wait for you to see the makeover of Jessica's space. It's not coming out for a couple more weeks and then hopefully I can do a podcast with her and we'll talk about how life changing it is. But I do hope that you checked out the other makeover that I recently did of Lisa's craft room. Because it was a matter of decluttering and then realizing the vision of the space and creating these really easy zoned systems. Quick, fast, easy. I was there for two days and we have gotten messages from Lease at least every few days since. Of all the things that she's crafting now, of all the wonderful things that she's making, of the other rooms in her home that she's decluttering and organizing and doing the same thing. She is so proud of herself. That was a couple of weeks ago. It is staying tidy. She loves the space. She's crafting with her kids and her grandchildren in the space. Two days to change your life. No more excuses. It's time to roll up your sleeves and take action. Look at your home differently and create the home that you deserve. Make it easier. Make it, make it more fun. Make your home your dream space. You can do this. You gotta let go of the perfection, the expectations, the mindset. Embrace these crappy, quick, easy solutions. You have to let go of massive amounts of stuff. Do you want this or not? Do you? Are you craving this or not? You can have excuses of why you can't do it, or you can have results, but you can't have both. Be a hero. Put on that cape, pick up that trash bag, pick up that box, and start radically reducing the stuff in your home. And then take an audit of the time sucks and think about how you can change those systems to be easier. What can you do to take a look? Quick little shortcut, my friends. Okay? And then embrace these. These good enough quick and easy shortcuts. And then think, how can I have my home reflect me, my family, and the activities we want to really do in this space? It's not about redecorating. Are the things in this space that are featured, that are prominent that you see, things that make you feel happy and excited and. And motivated and inspired? Do you have a bunch of artwork on the wall that you don't even really like, or do you have instruments hung on the wall? Are you inviting? Is your home inviting you and reflecting you to engage in your activities and your hobbies? Is. Is you have. Is it photos on the walls and memories and. And joy? Is it joy? If not, do something about that right now, my love. Every room should have a purpose. And when you walk into that room, that purpose should be obvious immediately by what you can see. Okay, My friends love spending time with you today. I hope you're feeling motivated and I'll see you guys next time.