http://www.ClutterDiet.com Get organized with home organizing tips from professional organizers at The Clutter Diet. Memories, like the corners of my mind... Are the corners of your mind over flowing with memorabilia? Are you home organizing photos and sentimental keepsakes? How do you get organized when you are surrounded by scattered pictures and heirlooms? In today's video Lorie Marrero Gives you the rules for decluttering and keeping your misty water colored memories in order. Figuring out how to organize your inheritance will make remembering less stressful. Make sure it's the laughter we will remember whenever we remember... The way we were. These Clutter Video Tips are posted frequently here on our clutterdiet organizing channel. Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com and the author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life. Lorie also serves as the national spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International and ambassador of the Donate Movement.
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Hi. I'm Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, we are going to do a 2-part series on sentimental items. This is a hard subject for people. We're doing Part 1 of this series on the rules of keeping sentimental items. And Part 2 will be about ways to let it go.
We have four rules about keeping things that you feel sentimental about. First, you need to prioritize it. Like wine, sentimental items and memorabilia are best enjoyed within limits. We suggest, using what we call a limiting container. This could be any kind of container you like. You have that as the amount of space available to keep this kind of memorabilia. If you're talking about cards and letters, or you're talking about old clothing, you know that when that container is full that is your cue to clean out what's in there and prioritize the items before you add anything else to it.
I just cleaned out my son's room. He just went to college a few weeks ago. Some of the things that I found in his room were his baby blankets. He had a very strong attachment to two blankets. Out of all the stuff that we found in the room these were the only two things that I really wanted to keep. I was able to just prioritize and say, all the other stuff isn't as important as these, which I find are really the essence of his childhood. What really makes up that memory for you in the strongest possible way with the most succinct amount of items.
The second rule about keeping sentimental items is to identify it. If you're keeping it, you want to make sure that if you get hit by a bus, somebody else knows what this is. This is particularly important with pictures. If you had your children all of sudden needing to go through all of your photos, do they know who these people are in the photos? Do they know what year it was? It's great if you can just simply organize your photos even into a shoebox with little dividers or something. You don't have to put everything perfectly away in albums -- if you're not ready to do that or don't have enough time to do that -- but make sure that somebody can know who those people are and why these things are being kept and what significance they have.
The third rule is to organize your stuff. Have some kind of system. If you're going to keep this stuff, the whole point of keeping it is that you can access it when you want it. And as my good friend Barbara Hemphill says: "If you don't know you have it, or you can't find it, it is of no use to you." Make sure you have a filing system or you have things labeled in bins or something so that you can actually find what you're looking for.
And the fourth rule of keeping sentimental items is that you want to enjoy it. Give it a place of honor in your home. Why not get it mounted or framed? Put it in your everyday living area so you can enjoy it. You can find little items and put them all in a shadow box, you can take a big collection of, running race t-shirts and make them into a t-shirt quilt. You can Google that and find out there are a lot of people that will make a t-shirt quilt for you. You can make pillows out of other kinds of fabric items, old clothing, or even things like these blankets. Make sure that you are finding ways to incorporate these memories into your daily living.
If you'd like some help making some of these decisions -- we know it can be very hard when emotions are involved -- we can help you, walk you through that. We have a team of organizers on-line seven days a week that is available to you at about the price of a pizza, and better than that, you can try it out for free with our QuickStart Program. You can find out more about that at http://www.clutterdiet.com/quickstart.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
