Do you love the thought of "getting away?" A Great Get Away catches our attention! Much of our desire to get away on vacation is to subconsciously get away from our stuff. At the resort it’s easier to forget about the garage that’s filled leaving the car to live in the drive-way. When you’re eating out in restaurants on vacation it’s easier to forget about the outdated food in your pantry and the cupboards filled with stuff you don’t cook with or eat on. When you go to bed in a hotel room it’s easier to forget about your closets filled with old linens, tired towels and clothes you can’t fit into. When you're distracted by new surroundings it's easy to forget about the attic crammed with sentimental stuff that’s boxed up waiting for you to be sentimental over it. Clutter creates stress. Stress makes you want to get away! So if you could eliminate clutter, maybe you wouldn’t want to get away!
How Far Down the Road Are You Going to Drag it?
The older we get the more stuff we accumulate and if we don’t release our accumulations on a regular basis we can end up dragging our stuff with us year-after-year, decade-after-decade down the road of life. How far down the road do you plan to drag your stuff? After a while, the stuff really becomes a drag until we croak and then we leave our draggings for our kids to drag around!
When I figured out how to be organized it was 1977. My sister and I put our heads together and came up with a plan that started with cleaning out our closets, cupboards and drawers first, before we set up a weekly plan and 3x5 card file system. We called the Chapter in “Sidetracked Home Executives: from pigpen to paradise“(the book we wrote about how to get organized) “All Dressed up with a Dirty Neck.” We got the idea from our mom who taught us that you have to get the underneath clean before you dress up the outside of yourself. We carried that thought to our get organized project.
We found out that when our closets, cupboards and drawers were organized and provided a place for everything so everything could be in its place, our homes stopped being cluttered, we stopped spending hours looking for misplaced things, trying to soothe angry family members looking for their stuff and our stress levels plummeted. Cleaning out those holding places was the surprise key to having our homes feel like a resort.
What if you decided to make 2018 your year to stop dragging your stuff around? What if you turned your home into the great get away, or at least the feeling of a great get away? If you want to make 2018 more like a vacation, then decide on a room you want to transform and gut all of its storage places. Only put back what you love and use frequently.
If you need help knowing what to do with all the other stuff, get the Sidetracked Sister’s De-junking video and learn how simple it is. When you order the video you’ll also get the cardfile system (which I beg you not to use until you watch the video and get the one room you picked streamlined).
As I put all our Christmas decorations away, I ended up putting a quarter of the festive stuff into the Goodwill Box because it no longer makes me happy. Just that gesture put me in the mood to get rid of more and I spent an hour boxing up a whole trunk load of non-happy-making items.
To order the Sidetracked Sister's De-junking Video and cardfile system, just click on the cover. Happy Vacation!
