Breathe Life Into Your Home by Decluttering The Surfaces

Your surfaces are the first thing someone notices when they enter your house. When they’re clear and uncluttered, your home feels open, welcoming, and tidy. When they’re covered in unnecessary items or misplaced things, your home feels smaller and in disarray. So it only makes sense that clearing your surfaces would be the perfect place to start when you begin to declutter your home.

Think about how it feels when someone calls to let you know that they’ll be dropping by unexpectedly. You scramble to clean up the surfaces, stuffing things in drawers and cabinets. Maybe throwing stuff on a bed in a guest room and closing the door, praying no one will need to go upstairs because you only have enough time to make the downstairs visit worthy.

Everyone wants to make a good first impression, and with a little time and a mighty effort, you can probably present your best face to guests. But when they leave, you feel drained and honestly, embarrassed by what it took to make your home presentable. 

It’s easy to focus on making visitors feel welcome, but what about how we feel inside our own homes? 

Home is supposed to be a place of refuge and rest. A place for family and memories. Not a place of constant stress and chaos. Unfortunately, for mothers, this is often the case. 

Our days consist mostly of cleaning up after other people. Leaving no time to enjoy our home or the people in it. 

We create cleaning routines that never work because we’re slaves to the everyday messes. We organize and we buy bins and shelves, but everything makes its way back onto the floor or counters. Leaving us feeling like we’ve wasted our time and money. 

You’ll never truly find freedom from clutter until you get rid of it. 

I know how it feels to want to be a more present mom, knowing that my home will suffer if I stop for one minute to enjoy my family.

I know how it feels to want to say yes to outings and picnics and date nights, knowing it’ll take days to catch up if I get even a little behind. 

I know what it’s like to be drowning in your life, desperately searching for a solution to start living again. 

That’s where I was when I found minimalism. Here’s how I breathed life back into my home and my motherhood by clearing the surfaces for good. 

Getting Started

Getting started is always the hardest part. Making the time, and then trying to find the motivation to take on a new project are both very real hurdles, but when you reach that place where you’re willing to try anything because you know something has to change – you just have to do it.

Don’t make excuses or procrastinate. You can declutter your home by setting aside 15 minutes a few time a week if that’s all you can spare. Then put in an ear bud with your favorite playlist, and do this for you. You’re going to feel so empowered when you decide to stop letting life happen to you, and start making it work for you!

Here we go!

Take a laundry basket or empty box (it may take many) and clear:

• Kitchen counters
• The dining room table
• On top of the fridge
• Your nightstands and dressers
• Next to the TV
• Your desk or computer stand
• Any other visible surfaces in your home

Don’t open cabinets or drawers for now, just clear the surface areas, especially the clutter catchers.

Once you’re done, set aside a time THIS WEEK, don’t put it off, and go through it all. Make a decision on every single thing. Don’t let it sit until later or it becomes one more thing on your already overflowing to do list. 

Don’t hesitate or overthink it. If it should go, get rid of it. This is your life, Mama. Take it back. You deserve to have freedom from overwhelm. 

The Three Questions:

Look at you taking action and making change happen! How does it feel? Amazing, right!

So… now you’ve got all these piles of stuff and you need to know what do with them. We’re going to start by asking three questions for each item:

1. Do I know this item is useful to me (right now, in this season), or do I believe it to be beautiful?

The first question is the most straight forward. If you don’t know an item to be useful or believe it to be beautiful, why are you letting it take up space in your life? 

Everything, no matter how small, costs you time: to clean it, to move it, to organize it, to look at it. It may not cost you much, but it costs you something. Is it worth it?

The hardest things to let go of are often gifts you’re holding onto out of obligation, or things that cost a lot of money when you purchased them. Here’s my advice:

Make your lifestyle change known to your family and friends. Tell them you’re trying to reclaim the joy in your motherhood by simplifying so you can focus on the things that really matter. 

I’ve found that most people are understanding of the fact that our needs change, and they’d rather an item went to a better home than sat unused. 

If you think someone would be truly hurt by you donating an item they’ve gifted you, ask them if they’d like you to return it to them. Let them know that while you appreciate their generosity, this item isn’t serving you anymore and you’d like to see it go somewhere where it can be put to better use. 

As far as big ticket items go, you didn’t waste the money when you donated the item, you wasted the money when you bought something you didn’t really need. 

Don’t let mistakes from the past keep you from moving forward today.

2. When was the last time I used this item?

The second question is a little harder. In general, I’d say if you haven’t used something in the last 30-90 days, it’s probably not worth the space it’s taking up or the time it takes to clean and maintain it. 

The exceptions to this rule are seasonal items (like decorations), things you use regularly though not often (like serving dishes for entertaining), and things you’re SURE you’ll need again (like baby and maternity clothes if you’re not done having kids). 

3. Can I live happily and easily without this item?

The third question is the one where people begin to make excuses, but you have to make the hard choices once you’ve gotten rid of the easier items to purge. 

Can I live happily and easily without this item? The question has two parts and requires both answers to be yes. 

There are things we could happily live without but might not do so easily. For those, I’d say keep them until you can replace them with something you love. 

For example: I could happily live without my couch. It’s old and sinking in some places. My dog has stained it and my kids think it’s a trampoline. While I could happily live without it, I couldn’t easily do without it, and it’s not a small expense to replace it. So we’ve decided to keep it until our little ones are big enough that we don’t need to worry about spills and ninja jumps.

That’s a big ticket item, but this works for smaller things too. Maybe you hate the pots and pans your mom passed down to you. The expense to replace them may not be as big as a furniture purchase, but small things add up.

Make a list of everything you need for now but want to replace in the future, and save a little here and there to buy the things that truly bring you joy. 

We start to make excuses when we’re faced with the things we could easily do without but might not do so happily. This is where you have to put on your big girl panties and decide if you really want to change your life or you just want to keep complaining about it. 

If something truly lights you up and brings a smile to your face every time you see it, keep it. The point of minimalism isn’t to sacrifice for the sake of less, it’s to find freedom in less so you can live more. 

The problems arise when you decide everything makes you happy. Remember, there are three questions that need to be addressed for each item. Making you happy isn’t enough if it’s no longer serving you well.

A good example of this is clothes that don’t fit. Sometimes we hold onto old dresses or outfits that we love, knowing they’ll never fit us again. Our bodies change. We grow, we have kids, we get older. None of these are bad things. But there comes a point when you have to let the past be the past and step forward with confidence into the season you’re living in now.

Don’t let regret or nostalgia hold you back from the life you deserve.

The Three Piles:

After you ask the three questions for each item, you’ll put them in one of three piles:

1. Keeping
2. Donating
3. Trash

Put everything you’re keeping away where it goes (don’t leave a mess for later), throw away all the trash, then bag up the donation center stuff and put it right in your car.

Don’t make the mistake I did and put your donations in the basement for later. They’ll inevitably make their way back into the hands of your family, or get mixed up with everything else you have in storage. It requires a Herculean effort to once again sort, purge, and clean the clutter you’ve relocated.

The same goes for items you choose to sell. Bigger ticket items will sell reasonably well on Facebook yardsales, but do it right away or they’ll end up sitting around and becoming clutter again.

*A note on donating: I recently read an article Dear World: Let’s Stop Giving Our Crap to the Poor. It’s a very eye opening and humbling article about how we believe the poor can do with our junk while we save the “good stuff” for ourselves and the more deserving. If something is trash, throw it away. If you believe someone could truly benefit from the use of something you’re passing on, donate it. Let’s make sure we’re serving from a place of true generosity.

When you start to declutter your home, your surfaces are a great place to start because they are visible (rather than start behind closet doors and closed cabinets). Seeing your progress will help you gain momentum and begin to truly understand the impact your clutter has on your stress levels.

You don’t have to take it all on at once. Simplification has a snowball effect. Start small, then keep rolling until you’ve finished the job. I promise you, it’s worth it.

Motherhood was not meant to be a season of burden that we merely survive. Take back your space, your time, and your joy. You’ve got this, mama!

---

Freebie ALERT!

---

Did you love this post about clearing your surfaces to declutter your home? Pin it for later!