Have you ever considered the cost of clutter in your home?
You know that sinking feeling of overwhelm you get when you look around your house and see all the clutter?
Piles of paper on the counter, overflowing shelves, and random stuff stashed in your bedroom and closet because you just don’t know where else to put all the things.
I know that feeling too. It’s not a good feeling. The emotions can range from overwhelm and disgust to fatigue and frustration, and everything in between.
The stress is real.
If you are at the point where you’re saying, “Enough is enough,” then you know it’s time to take action! ACTION!
The number 1 reason people do not succeed in decluttering their home is due to not taking action.
After all, life is too short to be drowning in clutter day after day.
In this blog post, I want to seriously motivate all of us (including myself) with 14 compelling reasons to start decluttering your home right away.
THE HIGH COST OF CLUTTER IN YOUR HOME
1. Clutter causes you to miss out on living your best life.
Time is ticking away and great days are slipping by. You and I are not getting any younger. Our children are growing up fast.
These days can be part of the best years of our lives.
But if we continue to live in clutter, we sometimes find ourselves drowning in overwhelm, and robbed of creating the very best life we can for ourselves, our families, and even our friends.
Part of living the best life God has for you is to actually enjoy the journey. But let’s be honest…
The journey is hard to enjoy when the house is full of clutter everywhere!
2. Clutter causes you to waste time.
How much of your valuable time have you wasted searching for an item in your home that you know you have somewhere? You know it’s there because you just saw it last week, right?
But now you can’t find it.
And so you waste precious moments of your day looking for an item that should be easy to find. Believe me, I have done this more times than I care to admit. What if we added up all that wasted time over the span of days, weeks, months, and years?
Oh my, let’s don’t even go there!
But here’s something worth considering: Think for a moment how much time you spend taking care of all the clutter, trying to find ways to store it, or just rearranging it.
Wasting your valuable time is a huge cost of clutter!
3. Clutter causes you to waste money.
When you search your entire house and you can’t find that important thing you need, what do you do?
If you’re like the rest of us, you make a trip to the store and use your hard-earned money to buy another one. Sometimes you might not even realize you already had another one because of the clutter.
Overdue library books and bills you can’t find in the clutter are all costing you money in fines and late charges. Even gift cards get lost in clutter, so we miss out on free money.
Also, you may be missing out on making some cash by selling your unused clutter.
Having an excessive amount of clutter can make you think you need to pay for a storage unit. I have known of people renting a storage unit for more than 5 years without ever opening the storage unit door! In fact, it was so long, they could not even remember what they were storing inside the unit.
I have to be completely honest here. I can see how this sort of thing could happen. After all, I have done the very same thing on a smaller scale in my own home. I have often forgotten the things stored out of sight in drawers, in the attic and even in my closet.
4. Clutter causes you to waste physical and mental energy.
It takes physical energy to continually lift piles of stuff from here to there and back again. But that’s what happens when we are forced to shift clutter from one place to another in order to find that missing item.
Piles of stuff everywhere you look all over the house will drain your mental energy and give you a cluttered mind. When you’re drowning in physical clutter, the resulting fatigue keeps you from being able to focus and carry on daily tasks at your best.
Let’s face it. We all have a limited amount of energy. Life is tiring and busy.
We all have groceries to buy, meals to plan and cook, bills to pay, errands to run, activities to attend, and the list goes on. All of these things add up to an amazing amount of energy.
If your home is cluttered, your brain has to work overtime, and it feels like your work is never done.
5. Clutter creates stressful emotions of anxiety, frustration, and failure.
When we live in clutter day after day, we find ourselves thinking “I wish I could be more organized”. We can begin to have feelings of frustration because deep down we know there must be a better way.
Ultimately, we can even feel like a failure because we just don’t know what to do about it.
The more time you waste looking for an item, the more frustrated you become. Frustration can take hold of your emotions, making you moody and grumpy. If you’re not careful, you may even start to envy someone else who seems to have it all together with a “clutter-free” home.
6. Clutter makes it harder to clean your house.
Clutter collects dust and simply gets in the way when we try to clean. How can we effectively clean the house if there’s clutter everywhere? We end up cleaning around all the piles and stuff.
And even when we finish cleaning, the clutter still keeps the house from looking clean.
7. Clutter is a waste of space.
Have you ever thought about how much valuable space is underneath all of that clutter?
A cluttered house feels like a cramped house. It may even make us think we need a bigger house when really we just need less stuff.
8. Clutter causes embarrassment.
Have you ever felt embarrassed at the thought of other people seeing your clutter? Most of us would rather go hide in a hole than have people in our home.
I love the way Flylady calls it CHAOS: Can’t Have Anybody Over Syndrome! I’ve been there for sure!
Ultimately, the cost of clutter keeps you from opening your home to others and practicing hospitality.
9. Clutter causes inefficiency.
A cluttered home makes every project, job, or chore more difficult. The thought of gathering the supplies and tools you need to start a simple craft project or DIY home project can be overwhelming.
In a cluttered home, the tools and supplies that are actually useful do not have a designated place. They are harder to find and are often buried somewhere. As a result, projects can take twice as long as they should.
You may even skip out on enjoyable creative projects altogether because it can seem like it’s just not even worth trying.
10. Excessive clutter causes strained family relationships.
Family members who live together in a cluttered home are far more likely to get on each other’s nerves and become annoyed with each other’s clutter. As a result, everyone can become tense and irritable. Bickering and arguing result.
Children’s senses can become overstimulated if they live in excessive amounts of clutter, causing behavior problems and anxiety.
Sometimes we may be tempted to put off decluttering because… “Well, it’s just stuff. I’ll get around to it someday.” But a family living for years without order around the home is a high cost of clutter in our lives.
11. Clutter can cause poor stewardship of your resources and possessions.
If you have items that are unused or forgotten, consider the possibility that someone else might have a need for those items (including you).
Letting go of certain items you don’t use is not always easy. But sharing them with others and knowing you are helping someone else does make the process easier.
Stewarding your possessions well also includes selling unused items for income. So whether you give away or sell, it’s a step in the right direction.
12. Clutter will rob you of a beautiful, peaceful home.
Clutter lacks order, and a cluttered home steals your peace of mind.
Sometimes we can be deceived into thinking that if we could just move to another house, the clutter problem will go away.
But the hard truth is that if we are drowning in clutter, we probably also have a clutter mindset. And if we moved to another house, the clutter would likely follow us there.
Any home can be beautiful and peaceful if it is cleared of clutter, even the home you live in right now!
13. Clutter will rob you of freedom and make you a slave to your stuff.
Honestly, if you have not yet been able to declutter your home, you might not know what I am talking about here. From my own experience I can tell you that until I finally got serious about decluttering, I didn’t even realize the freedom I was missing.
Decluttering your home is life changing!
14. A cluttered home keeps you from serving others well.
Since clutter causes wasted time, money, and energy, it will literally cripple us from serving others well.
Think about it. If I have a sick friend and I want to take a meal to her, I need money to buy what’s needed, along with time and energy to prepare the meal and deliver it. So it often takes all three of those things to be a help to my neighbor.
Unfortunately, the crippling results of clutter will often cause you to skip serving altogether. We ultimately miss out on being a blessing to others.
Conclusion
Missing out on living your best life as a cost of clutter is probably the number one reason to consider making a change.
The wasted time, money, energy, space, and freedom are simply not worth holding on to excessive stuff in our lives. The stressful emotions, inefficiency, and embarrassment, along with strained relationships and the inability to serve well could cause us to live a life of regret.
I sincerely hope this list will be a sobering reminder and motivator for all of us to start a decluttering plan today. If you can catch a glimpse of the changed life that is within your reach as you get serious about ditching the clutter, you’ll be able to start fresh on your abundant life journey!
Here’s to your abundant, clutter-free life!
God’s grace to you,
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YOUR TURN: How would you rate your home on the clutter scale of 1 to 10 (10 being excessively cluttered)? What are your current struggles with clutter? What do you think would be the most helpful thing to you in ditching clutter? Please share in the comments below!
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