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                                                           Do you have a hard time with clutter control in your home? Do you have different items throughout your home that you hate to part with but they are just taking up space? Here are 3 organizing ideas for clutter control to help you get control of the things you have in your home.

I remember stories of spring cleaning where the women would take the rugs out and hang them on a line and beat out the dirt.  They would wash walls and work for weeks sweeping out the cobwebs and making their homes spic and span.

With our modern conveniences we no longer need to wait until spring to get our homes clean and organized.
Here are 3 organizing ideas to master clutter control in your home year-round:

1. Do you have a sock eater at your home? Do you swear that you put both socks in the washer and you only get one back in return? Do you keep that one sock thinking somehow and sometime it will show up? To enhance clutter control in your home I recommend keeping the lone sock in a pile with the other loners for one month.  If it hasn’t turned up by then get rid of it. If you have a dog or a cat you could make a toy out of it, but they probably have plenty of toys so doing this will just add to the clutter you are working to eliminate. It is okay to let go! One idea is to buy all the same color of socks so you never have a mismatched sock.

2. Are you hanging on to old faded and worse stained tee shirts or those that don’t fit any more? One organizing idea for clutter control for these or other clothes that fit this description is to donate them to a local charity, they can use them for rags or some ship them to foreign countries for humanitarian projects. When my daughter worked in Eritrea Africa her school students were always wearing shirts that obviously came from the USA. (Where else would the Simpson's and Garfield come from to mention just a couple of them)?

If you are crafty and the tee shirts have special meaning to you, make a quilt or if you have only a couple, make a pillow.  If you don’t know how, hire someone to do it for you. Another craft you could do with the shirts is to tear them into strips and make braided rugs. Depending on the fabric of the shirt they might be good to cut up and use for dust cloths.

3. Let’s talk about calendars.  We chose them for the pretty pictures and then have a hard time parting with them to make way for the next years calendar. Get over it. Throw them away—recycle them. Don’t think of putting them in the drawer, behind the filing cabinet or in the cabinet where they probably don’t fit anyway. You are on a roll to clutter clear your home.  I know it is hard. I took my own advice and got rid of eight calendars I didn’t think I could live without.  And now I don’t even remember what they were.

Now, if you can’t part with the pretty pictures here are some suggestions on things I have done with them. I then got rid of all the other calendars—which I don’t miss and it was a wonderful feeling as I was clutter clearing.  If you are crafty they can be used for scrapbooking. Decoupage them onto suitcases and use them as end tables. They are a great conversation piece. Laminate them and cut the pictures up to make puzzles for your children.  They will wear out and then you can throw them away guilt free. You could laminate the pictures to make place mats. But whatever you do with them always think about clutter control.

It is the little things that build up in our homes that create clutter. Before keeping something ask yourself does it light you up and make you happy that you are keeping it? If the answer is “I don’t know, I’m not sure, maybe”-- then let it go. You won’t miss it and you will be on your way to better clutter control in your home and in your life.

For more organizing ideas for clutter control click here.