Little Things

I love watching the organizing and design show “Clean House” on the Style Network.  The fabulous Niecy Nash and her awesome crew are crusaders against clutter and usually deliver a much needed wake up call to families who cannot see how bad their clutter has become.  The team helps the family make tough decisions about releasing long-held clutter and then gives them several lovely new rooms to get started on a clutter-free lifestyle.  (Whether these people know how to maintain this newfound organized life is another topic for another day!)

Clean House recently had their third annual “Search for the Messiest House in the Country.” I just watched the episode involving this year’s “messiest house” last night.  It was a disturbing situation in many ways.  As with last year’s “messiest house”, this family was not only overrun with clutter but living with a certain degree of honest to goodness filth.  The increasingly defensive and oddly crass homeowner described appliance after appliance that did not work in the home and the bizarre systems she had developed to deal with this instead of just having the appliances repaired.  It was clear that she and her daughter no longer saw how dirty their space was or even how truly odd their lifestyle had become.

Watching this episode got my wheels turning about the clutter or small messes that we no longer see in our homes.  While the owners of the “messiest house” were living in extreme conditions, many of us are living with at least one or two small clutter or repair issues in our homes that we just haven’t addressed recently.  Many of these things can be easily remedied; they’re often just a little annoying or time consuming.

Think of something in your home that needs to be dealt with and schedule some time to take care of it this week or weekend!  If it is a small repair, put it on your calendar for later in the week, gather the necessary supplies or call the necessary professional and deal with it!  If you have four small repairs, tackle one a week for the next month.  If it is a pile of papers that need to be sorted and filed, schedule an hour on Thursday night and as Niecy always says, “Get to gettin’!”  If you have several items of clothing that you are not wearing because they need simple repairs, gather them together this week and get over to the tailor. 

Take the plunge and attack something this week! When we leave multiple repairs unfinished and annoying little errands incomplete they can nag at us and upset the calm we want to cultivate during our time at home. If left for months or even years on end, these small items can become the breeding ground for serious life-altering clutter.