Home Sweet Home {Getting Rid of Clutter}

 As we work to sell our house and are trying to get ready for moving something that I have been working at a lot is getting rid of clutter. There are two big reasons for this.

1. When selling a house you want it to look as big as possible. The less stuff you have crammed in an area - the bigger it will look. People want spacious rooms and with less clutter even a smallish house house can look spacious. I am noticing that our kitchen that I find to be rather small can look rather roomy when there are empty counters.
2. When getting ready to move it is super nice to have everything already gone through and then you can pack only the things you really want at your next place. Decluttering early on and continuing to work on it will help a lot when closing day comes.

Some of the things that I have been working on are to make our house less cluttered are:

• When I have a little extra time I either choose a whole room or just a little cupboard and I systematically go through it all - see if there is anything in it that I don't either find useful or beautiful and if that is the case then I get rid of it. 
• I am working at finishing up projects, getting clothes mended, stuff like that so that everything is in good working shape and not just sitting around being clutter.
• I am working to read through magazines and books that have been sitting around. Magazines are getting recycled after being read and books are often getting packed or returned to whoever they belonged to or if it isn't such a good book after all then I get rid of it.
• I am trying not to buy much and even work on using up some of the food we had stocked up.
• Ken had a couple of empty rooms at his office and since we both wanted to lighten up the amount of stuff that we had here and also because we will be kind of in limbo after this house sells without having a house to move all our stuff too we decided it would work well to store a bunch of stuff there. So a lot of our stuff that we don't really need right now (like many books, some kitchen things, etc) we have been packing up and taking there. It is going to be nice to have that all done already when it is time to move.
• Whenever we get ready to have another showing I will try to walk around the house and I try to look at it like somebody else might see it. What clutter is sitting around that I am just used to and what things are dirty (windows - a smudge on the wall for example) that I don't notice? It seems like every time I come up with some new thing that I can pack away or get rid of and some new area to clean.

What do we do with the clutter that we are getting rid of?

• Give it away.
• Trash it.
• Recycle it.
• Sell it.

 How do you work to get rid of clutter at your place? Do you think that is an important part of selling a home?