Is your home ready for the holidays? Mine certainly isn’t. I’ve been trying to get ready, slowly, but sadly, I’ve not accomplished much. I really need to get ready for company. We usually host Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, sometimes a Christmas party as well. We don’t always do those on the designated day because we want our friends to be able to celebrate the holidays with us without having to choose between us and their families.
Before the stream of people, I need to get the house ready. For me, that means lots of decluttering. I try to keep the house decluttered but always seem to backslide. When getting your home ready for the holidays the first thing I suggest is to go from room to room with three trash bags or boxes. These will be donate, trash and things that belong somewhere else. This is a great time to go through your children’s toys and books to make room for the new ones.
When Hailey was small I always explained that there were children who did not have nice clothes, warm coats, toys or books. Then we talked about the gifts she would be receiving and how nice it would be for someone else to enjoy the things she no longer needed. Together we went through her room and filled the boxes to donate.
It’s important to do this in every room of the house because we all accumulate things that we don’t use everywhere. Even the bathroom, do you have bottles of shampoo that after trying once you didn’t like? You can box up all those opened products and put them on freecycle, people will be more than happy to take them off your hands. This saves someone else money and keeps those unused products from ending up in the landfill.
This week do a house scrub, go through one room a day. Remember, you are not cleaning, that will come later, for now, you are simply getting rid of what is no longer useful to you.
Also, get rid of the donate bags as soon as they are full, otherwise you may be tempting to pull things out of them. The purpose of this is to get rid of all the stuff that is cluttering your house and weighing you down.