When I tell people that I am a professional organizer they always assume my house is perfectly put together. My answer is always “No, our house is lived in!” My house is not the epitome of perfect. But I do have a little secret for making it look company ready in 10 minutes or less. I do a Laundry Basket Clean Sweep. All this entails is taking a laundry basket and picking up all the clutter I see in 10 minutes and then stashing the basket in an unseen place. Let’s be honest here, in a perfect house I wouldn’t have clutter to stash but this house is not perfect. Sometimes I get busy, sometimes life happens, sometimes stuff accumulates. Sometimes you need to give yourself permission to not be perfect all the time and allow yourself a few of those clutter stashing moments.
There is one major rule to this game though:
You must tackle that basket first thing the next day! Don’t stash it and pretend it never happened!
So what about you? Do you have clutter stashing days of your own?
RSS
I do the same thing, except I have a basket for each of the rooms. 4 little rolling ones that just scoot into my room, the kids rooms and the office. Then when company visits, I don’t even have to hide them if I don’t want to, it just looks like a basket of stuff under the desk, or by the closet door. I LOVE it.
I also have 4 little baskets on the shelf near the door for keys, pens, toys, mail, whatever comes in the house and usually gets dropped on the kitchen counter or table.
And the baskets come in handy when I have a reciept for somethign I bought. The reciept gets attached with an alligator paper clip to the box of the person the item was for. Then if something happens, I know right where the reciept is if I need to make a return or exchange.
There are a couple of variations on this…I do the laundry basket thing with each room – takes a bit longer but here’s the gist: in one room, put everything in a basket that doesn’t belong. Go to another room. Anything that’s in the basket that belongs in that room, put it away. Anything that’s in the room that doesn’t belong, put it in the basket. Works great!
Other idea is if you fill up the basket and hide it, if you don’t NEED any of the stuff in it over the next while…then why are you keeping it at all? Give it a new home!
We did a clutter stash last night. I just wish we had more storage space.