It’s easy for stuff to accumulate.  It begins with leaving a pen on a kitchen countertop and the next thing you know, there’s paper next to that pen, and then sunglasses, and then a phone charger, and then a phone.  Suddenly, your work space is gone.  You can barely fit your cutting board on the counter, or find a place to put your ingredients for cooking dinner.

This happens in my kitchen all the time.  One of my counters often becomes a makeshift office, and for the past few months, it has been overcrowded with appliances.

Once of my goals during my month of de-cluttering was to clean off the counters in my kitchen, and make them, well, viable kitchen work spaces again.

This is what my countertop looked like earlier this week.

It’s not awful but not great.  I always have the cleaning spray on the counter “for convenience” even though there is room for it underneath the sink. There is my pen and pad for quick notes and reminders by the coffee pot.  That large red thing is the ice cream maker that I have been raving about.  But we don’t use it every day, so I wanted to find it a more unobtrusive home. Oh, and those little ornaments hanging from the cabinet handles?  Don’t ask.  They have been hanging there for at least the past three Christmases. 

Getting this counter organized was not a huge task.  It took all of five or ten minutes. 

Here is the end result.

I put the cleaning spray back underneath the sink, put the notepad back in my note basket on the other counter, and I had to clear out some space in the pots and pan cabinet to make room for the ice cream maker.  I moved the phone charger (which you can’t see although the wire is hanging over the paper towels) to its appropriate place.  I tossed the ornaments.  They were not items to get sentimental over.

I make only a few small changes, but I feel like I have room to breathe.  Now, you walk into my kitchen, and there is an airy feel to it versus a cluttered one.    

I view my house cleaning month as a time to make small changes here and there, taking ten to thirty minutes each day to clear off a surface or unearth the back of a closet.  Holding this mindset of small changes makes the task manageable for me, and besides, when you put all of those small changes together, it leads to a bigger change.

People avoid de-cluttering entirely because they feel overwhelmed by it.  Psychologist Robert Mauer suggests that when we anticipate taking big steps in different areas of our lives, like having to clean out our entire house, write a novel, run a marathon, etc., our brains can actually panic and our bodies go into fight or flight mode. Small steps bypass the fear center of the brain, and we succeed. 

Break up your de-cluttering into the smallest steps possible.

• De-clutter one counter
• De-clutter one windowsill
• Clean out one shelf in your refrigerator at a time
• Clean out the top of your closet
• Clean out the medicine cabinet
• De-clutter one corner of your home
• De-clutter one drawer versus the entire bureau
• De-clutter one row of the file cabinet

Slowly, it all gets done, but you don’t have to worry about it “all” at one time.

Put yourself on a de-cluttering schedule.  Add it to your calendar in small tasks. Monday:  the closet, Tuesday: the medicine cabinet, etc.  This way, it gets done in small chunks, so it does not take up too much of your time, and it does not feel like an overwhelming one day or two day project.  But the bottom line is that it gets done.

As difficult as it can feel to get started on our house cleaning mission, when we let go of what we no longer need, we create space for something new, and I bet that something new is just brilliant!

Namaste, Divas!

© 2012 Ilene Evans 

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