23 Things to TOSS Now for Clutter-Free 2023 - Here’s How!

Hi there. With decluttering, sometimes getting started is the hardest part. So while I do have a free checklist you can download from the link in the Description, I have 23 things for you to get rid of today. So let's go. Okay. Do you have any of these? I'm not going to do a puppet show. Don't worry. If you have any socks that have holes in them, either fix them or get rid of them. When I was a kid, my grandma, we'd go to her house for a weekend and she always would sew up the holes in her socks. Nowadays it seems like that's a lost start. Either sew them and repair them or get rid of them. I know a lot of men and women like to collect shoes, and there's shoe collections that just sometimes surprise the heck out of me. I don't generally have a ton of shoes, but I do get it. It's good to go through and declutter your shoes. One tip that I have, because I know this is an emotional thing for some people, is turn all your shoes around so that they're facing the other direction. Let's say they're in the bottom of your closet. Turn them around so they're facing the back wall as you wear them. Turn them front ways so you can easily tell after a couple weeks or a couple months which ones you're wearing and which ones you're not. That will make decluttering them a lot easier. You're worried about seasonality. And you know, these I'm not wearing right now because, you know, it's cold outside, it's raining, I'm not wearing my sandals. That's fine, but leave them facing the other direction. And if you go through another season and you find you still haven't used them, declutter them. All right, let's have a heart to heart. If you have a bunch of takeout menus at your house, you get rid of them. Recycle them, don't donate them, recycle them. All the restaurants have their menus online. They're up to date. As soon as a menus printed, it's out of date. Embrace the Internet and get rid of old takeout menus. You just don't need them anymore. You know, when you go and get takeout, you end up with sauce packets. And a lot of people like to collect these. And my kids would bring them home and put them in the refrigerator or the pantry and I'm constantly tossing them out. Don't let these pile up. Go ahead in your kitchen, grab the ones you have and get rid of them. If you want to make an agreement with yourself, you're only going to keep a few of them and get rid of the rest. Okay. With magazines, we all have great intention and we want to read them. And, you know, we think we're going to have time to relax and just chill, but half the time we don't. And they stack up. They stack up on our dining room tables. They stack up on our kitchen counters. You need to go through and get rid of any and all magazines that you don't want. The ones you do want. Make a commitment to yourself on when you're going to read them, and then when it comes to having them come in the house. I have a deal with myself. I can keep five magazines. If I get a new one and I only have four sitting in my pile, that's fine. I just add it. But if I already have five and get a new one, then I have to look at my pile and decide, do I want any of these more than the new one? And whatever way I work it out, I make sure in the end I only have five. So what I like to do with the ones I don't keep is my mom will read them. So I save them for my mom. She reads them and then she passes them on. Share them so they don't go to waste. You can donate them to certain community centers or just recycle them. Okay. Do you collect books? Do you have a ton of books around the house that you've either read or intend to read? Definitely go through them. Make a commitment to yourself to read. If you read them, consider donating them to someone else or to a local library so somebody else can make use of them. Keep your favorites. Now designate an area where you want to store your favorites. Other people can enjoy the books and you no longer have the clutter. And the bonus is you don't have to dust them. You know, all that spare change you have laying around the house, gather it all up, take it down, turn it in, and turn it into real paper money that you can either put in your bank account or you can spend, but stop storing it all over your house. We generally don't use coins as much, so I feel like households aren't accumulating, you know, big coin jars like we used to. Take the plunge, get them. Get it all into one container and take it down and see how much money you have just laying around the house. With regards to makeup, it's great to go through your makeup and your other products to make sure that they're not expired, they're still in good shape, and that you don't have things that you no longer want. So what I like do to to do is say, this is all that I have. It's not, but if it was, what I like to do is take it out of the container, I store it in and then put it into like just a temporary container, put it all in there. Every day when I get ready, I'll pull out the things that I use and then I'll put it in the permanent container. Now, what gets left behind, let's say in a week or couple weeks in the temporary container are the things that you should consider getting rid of. Okay. If you have any old nail polish laying around that's all dried up, gross, or that you don't want to use, get rid of it, don't keep it and store it. A funny story, my daughter, she saw me making this list of things to toss and she said, you can't get rid of nail polish. And I said, yes, you can. If you have a way of reviving it, revive it and use it. If you don't, then get rid of it. Okay, hopefully you're keeping dead batteries and you store them so that you have a pile. But once you get a pile, go and take these to your local hardware store and let them properly dispose of these for you. Don't let them pile up around the house and definitely don't put them in the garb. A lot of households tend to accumulate cleaners over time. So what I challenge you to do is before you go and gather up all your products to see what you have, sit down and think about what you really need for your house and then think about how many you need. You have a two story house, you need one set for upstairs and downstairs. Do you just need one set? Do you want a set in each bathroom? Whatever it is, decide that. Then go look at all the cleaners that you have. Gather them all together. Anything that's not part of that five core items that you think you need to have for your house. Strongly question whether you need to keep them or get rid of them. Look up on your hazardous waste site to see how to get rid of them. I'll also link a site that you can use to look up for that general type of information. One thing I tend to find in people's garages when we're working on decluttering is a box or a bin of old light bulbs, and I don't know why people hold on to them. I think they most. They must hold on to them because they just don't know how to get rid of them. Gather up all of your light bulbs. Safely transport them to your local hardware store. Most hardware stores will safely dispose of them for you. So you can get them out of your garage. It can no longer be cluttering up your area and let them get rid of them for you. Do you have any electronics that you have laying around? Broken electronics, you know, old monitors, old computers that you no longer use, Cameras. Gather up the ones you're just not using. Whether they're broken or not, there's a lot of people that will buy them off you, take them off your hands for free or recycle them them for free for you, definitely get rid of them. The only thing that I suggest is if it's a computer or a camera or something like that, make sure that you have all of your information off of it before you hand it over. Okay? So during the pandemic, a lot of us would go grocery shopping and we couldn't reuse our bags. So we accumulated a lot of bags. We've got plastic and we have paper bags. One thing to do is decide how much you should really want to have and have on hand at any time right now. We can reuse our bags. So we shouldn't have a huge need to store a whole bunch of them. But a lot of us have out of control piles of these. So what I like to do is I have a container in here that says plastic and I have another one that says paper. And we don't store anything that doesn't fit into these containers. So that way it keeps it contained. If we end up with excess, which we shouldn't, but if we did, we would know that we've hit our limit and we need to get rid of them. What you can do is, what I did was I went through all of mine and I contacted a local food bank and they were able to use my old ones. Also thrift stores that can use your old ones. If all else fails, you can take them to your grocery store to recycle, tackle them, tackle these. You'll thank yourself because there's nothing worse than having bags sprung out all over the place. Do you have your old glasses? The ones that were prescription back or maybe even a couple prescriptions back? If my current pair break, I can at least use my old ones. And I think that's a great strategy. But how many will you go back? Definitely donate them wherever you buy your glasses from and they will let you know what? Organizations around you would definitely take them and put them to use. It's such a great gift to somebody who, who cannot afford to get glasses. So instead of letting them sit around and collect clutter in your house, donate them and put them to good use. So I just got back from vacation and in the hotel room there are bought little bottles of shampoo, conditioner, soap and everything. And I always think about people because a lot of people bring them back home. For the people who bring them back home and use them, great. But for the people who don't, all they do is they end up up cluttering their counters in their bathrooms or their linen closets. And they never put them to use because they're not their standard products that they use. And who wants to use all these little containers? Find somewhere where you can donate them or get rid of them. Don't let them take up valuable space. So let them go. I'm going to do a video on taming paper clutter. But if you have old, say, drugstore or grocery receipts, why are you holding on to them? You don't need them. If you use the items, you can get rid of them. The only time I would keep a drugstore receipt would be if something I needed to see if something fit. That's fine, try it on, make sure it fits, but then get rid of it. If you the receipt. If you're keeping the item. The second thing would be if you're giving a gift of a gift card and you bought it, definitely keep the receipt. As soon as the person who receives the gift card, they've turned it in and there was no problems with it, then get rid of this receipt. But in general, you do not need to store all these receipts. All they're doing is causing clutter on your counters, your entryway, and anywhere else you store them. So let them go. It's time to let go of small appliance manuals and any manuals for things you no longer have. If you don't trust me, go ahead and look them up online and you're going to be able to find almost any manual that you have for any device or any product that you bought online. So go check, make sure they're online, and then toss these. You don't need to keep them, and all they do is create clutter in your house. Okay, so I'm guilty of this and I definitely have worked on it the last couple years. But if we get boxes like this is a box for a phone, or if you have a box for some other device that you bought. And we tend to keep them because we think we might need the box, but we really don't find a use for the box. You should always try to repurpose anything that you have before getting rid of it. So if you can repurpose it, use this in a desk drawer. But if it's just going to sit on your shelf and take it from space, gather dust, get rid of it. Definitely you don't want to keep stuff like this around. Okay, if you have old phone books, we need to have a chat. You don't need them. You can let them go, but you have to consider the fact that once they're printed, the next minute they're already out of date. And the way things change and businesses change around here, you need to definitely let them go. You can look up anything you want with your smartphone or your computer. So I urge you to get rid of and recycle your phone books. Okay? One item to go through today is go through any supplements that you have or any medications and get rid of anything that is expired. I personally don't take anything if it's expired. You may have different. You may be okay with it, but regardless, you should have a line that you draw on the sand and say, anything older than X, I'm not going to keep, definitely go through them. There's no use in keeping them if you're not going to use them. I will link in the description below a site that you can go to to look up how to properly dispose of them. Them. Some things cannot just be thrown in the garbage or flushed or anything that you hear. So I'll definitely link that so you can look up what type of medication or supplement you have and the best way to dispose of it. The next time you're cooking and you're just standing around waiting for something to finish up, take a peek at your utensils. If something is broken, melted, not really of any use, get rid of it. You definitely don't want to keep stuff like that around. And there's a good chance you probably have another spatula or whisk or whatever else is broken already on hand. So go ahead and let the broken old stuff go. As you're working your way through the house, gather up any unused sporting equipment. We all have extra equipment around our houses. Sell it. Give it away to somebody who can actually make use of it. Maybe you can make some money or you can just gift it. If you want to give it to a friend or family member, definitely donate them and get them out of your garage. Okay, that was 23 things for you to gather up and get rid of today. Whether you're donating, recycling, selling, throwing away, whatever the appropriate thing is, go get that done. You will be so happy when you're done. And it'll only encourage you to continue on. I do have my free checklist. I'll link it again, like I mentioned, so that you can even do even more if you want to, and go through each room of your house. And I picked a video up for you here. If you want to get started on decluttering your kitchen counters. Here's a video I picked for you to help you get that done. See you next time.