How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets

by Dana K. White

All the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas in the world don’t get my bathroom clean. Know what gets it clean? Cleaning it.

Methods don’t clean your house. You have to clean your house.

Here’s what I had to accept: Cleaning my house is not a project. It’s a series of boring, mundane, repetitive tasks. The people whose homes are clean all the time do these boring, mundane, repetitive tasks.

Starting small, focusing only on dishes and washing them every day, brought about real progress. Progress I’d never experienced before. I didn’t worry about the whole house. I didn’t even worry about “the kitchen.” I just focused on the dishes.

Having a dishwasher or not having a dishwasher isn’t the issue. Having a routine or not having a routine is the issue. People with consistently clean kitchens have routines, whether or not they have dishwashers.

The only way to have a clean kitchen is to clean it. The only way to keep a kitchen in a state where it’s easy to clean is to do the dishes every single day, whether you have a dishwasher or not.

You’re desperate. So here you go: do the dishes.

Doing the dishes seems like the dumbest thing to do when you’re overwhelmed with a very messy home. Washing dishes feels pointless. Pointless because the people in your house insist on eating multiple times every single day, and every time they do, they use dishes. So even if you wash them right now, they’ll be dirty again in a few hours. Or maybe in a few minutes. The futility is disheartening. Depressing. Maddening. Overwhelming. But there is a point. Doing the dishes is the first step of this whole change-your-house process. Doing them again tomorrow is where the magic will happen.

What can you do to remove small stresses from your life? You can remove decisions about little things that don’t deserve daily brain space. When something registers as a recurring annoyance, try making a decision that will prevent it from being an irritation in the future.

Ten minutes is a really long time when you’re doing jumping jacks and a really short time when you need a nap. Basically, it’s a long time for something I don’t want to do and a short time for something I do want to do.

I have no interest in what should work. I care about only what does work.

Meal planning. Or, to put it more realistically, making sure your family doesn’t starve.

Anything I have too much of, that consistently gets out of control simply because I have too much of it, is clutter.

Start your own deslobification process by solving the unsolvable daily problems that frustrate you in your home. Habits make decluttering easier, and decluttering makes it easier to maintain habits.

I wanted my children to grow up with fond memories of simple things that are big in the mind of a child. The overabundance of stuff in my home was keeping me from being the mother I’d always dreamed of being.

As stuff left, peace came.

Decluttering is simply getting rid of stuff I don’t need. Organizing is problem-solving. When you have too much stuff, the problem is overwhelming and feels unsolvable. Giving myself permission to just declutter gave me permission to get started. I didn’t need a plan or a huge chunk of time.

Don’t focus on the pile. Focus on one thing.

Every time you move, you’re fighting decluttering paralysis. Every time something leaves the pile, you’re making progress.

If I truly need and use something on a regular basis, that thing deserves space in my home more than random things I almost never use.

The Visibility Rule: When I feel the urge to declutter, I start with visible clutter. I stop. I look around. I let my brain register which out-in-the-open space is piled with stuff.

Reality: I have too much stuff. A lot of it is trash.

Once you’ve answered “Where would I look for it?” with your first instinct, take it to that place now. Right now.

The thought of paying again for something I once decluttered feels ridiculously wasteful. Painfully wasteful. But what’s more wasteful? Spending three dollars to buy more glow-in-the-dark bracelets? Or paying a mortgage on a house where we can’t live comfortably because it’s so full of stuff and then paying three dollars for glow-in-the-dark bracelets when I already have some, but don’t even know I have them because they’re buried under a pile of stuff?

I’d get the decluttering bug and start pulling everything out of the space I was tackling. Pulling everything out makes perfect sense in a perfect world. If nothing ever happened to distract me and I could guarantee I’d finish this project before I needed to move on to things like eating or sleeping or bandaging wounds, I’d be fine.

I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve felt decluttering regret. Sometimes the regret is small; sometimes it’s big. But every single time, I have survived. I can live without stuff.

Now I realize holding so many things dear devalues the things that are truly special memories. If a treasured memory is buried in a pile of clutter, I’m not honoring it.

The first thing you’ll see is what other people selling this item think it’s worth. Maybe they know what they’re talking about. Maybe they don’t. I’ve been there. My heart does a little flip when I see someone selling the exact same thing I have for $150! Except on the first page of search results, they’re not. They’re trying to sell the exact same thing for $150. Scroll down and look on the left-hand side of the page. Look for two words: Completed listings. Completed listings matter. Nothing else does in your search for reality.

The main (difficult) lesson I learned in my eBay days is that an item is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

You bought this book to learn how to get your house in order, not to learn how to be a millionaire. The point of this chapter wasn’t to tell you how to get the most money out of your excess stuff. My goal was to help you bust through your perceived value excuse, a favorite excuse for people like me. Maybe your stuff is valuable and you do need the money. If that’s the case, sell it. Get the money you need while getting clutter out of your house. Living miserably, surrounded by clutter while believing you could get a lot of money if you just knew how, is not an option.

Here’s the real question: I’m overwhelmed because I can’t predict the future regarding the most important thing in my life, so what should I do? My answer: I can’t predict the future either. No one can. I definitely can’t predict your future because it has nothing to do with me. My solution: Don’t start with difficult things. Do the easy stuff first.

Once I established routines for myself, my family could jump into those routines because the routines existed.

Fantasy: If only I had more time, more energy, and a bigger house, this would all be easy. Reality: The life I have is the life I have, and my home is my home. I can’t change those things, so I might as well make the best of them.

Embracing reality is both the key to getting started and the key to making changes last.

As each new phase of life unfolded, I was disappointed again to learn my messiness hadn’t been magically cured by my circumstances.

A home that doesn’t have a system for dealing with the basics will consistently get out of control, no matter how much free time its inhabitants have. A home with systems in place for dealing with the basics can avoid Disaster Status even if its inhabitants are frazzled and overworked and exhausted.

Feeling overwhelmed with your life and schedule can work the same as being overwhelmed with a cluttered space. You don’t know where to start. Do the easy stuff first. Instead of being paralyzed by the overall chaos, focus small. Go slowly.

Just remember why you started reading this guide. You wanted hope for your home. Unfortunately, hope isn’t as ambiguous as it sounds. It isn’t something that floats around in the sky until it settles on top of your head. It’s something you work for. It’s something you discover after you put in some work.