Five More Items You Shouldn’t Save

Sometimes when we help our clients we do a kind of forensic decluttering. We can tell what there favourite reading materials are, what they like to collect, and what they have a hard time getting rid of. We help manage when there’s too much in any of these categories.

Often when we help our clients declutter it’s because things have gotten out of hand – too much stuff in too little space. Sometimes we’re helping cull their possessions because they’re downsizing and don’t have as much room in their new home. Another good reason to declutter, especially for those who find it hard to get around, is to make your home safer – less stuff to trip over so you can avoid falling and hurting yourself.

Here are five more items that don’t need to be saved

1.    Christmas decorations – one of our clients had enough to decorate three homes as they kept replacing and updating, but never threw out the old, the unused, or the broken items.
2.    Make-up – if you’ve come to the end of the tube of lipstick, discard it. Don’t put it back in the drawer as you won’t use it again. Use the same logic for any make-up – don’t keep the empty or near-empty container as it’s taking up space.
3.    Tax returns – in Canada we need to keep the documentation that goes into preparing your taxes for the previous seven years only. Anything older should be safely discarded; consider shredding anything containing SIN, or bank account number information, rather than just throwing it in the recycle bin.
4.    Plastic food containers/glass jars – Think of how many you use during the week – to store leftovers, or to help in household chores – and recycle the rest. Each grocery trip will bring more containers home, so you can replenish your stock if needed.
5.    Newspapers – once read they can be recycled. Even if you use newspapers to help clean windows or to keep the floor splatter-free when painting, you don’t need to keep large piles of them. If you need to refer to an article in a previous edition, it can be easily found online.

Our clients often tell us that decluttering makes them feel better about their homes, and the extra space comes in handy!