The start of another week and another month. How is it August already?? This year is just flying by at light speed. I recently just finished reading an ebook that has made a huge impact on my life. You know that I don’t often promote products for other people –mostly because there is a lot of junk out there available online. And the last thing any of us needs is to be wasting money and collecting more junk. Which is actually exactly why I really wanted to talk about this ebook.

I know that a lot of you share many of the same ideas and passions about life – you want to live a better life, be more self-sufficient and probably would enjoy having more time for your family as well. I’ve been struggling with trying to keep so many balls in the air at once that I often feel overwhelmed. And the place where it all starts is my home.

Ten years ago when my husband and I got married, we both had apartments full of stuff. In fact, I had even more because I worked in a china and glassware store, and had purchased full china service for 16 people, not to mention tons of different types of glasses – because who knew when I might start entertaining? We’ve collected things over the year, always adding but rarely purging.

And then we moved to our old farmhouse that literally had rooms full of stuff in it that wasn’t even ours. I’ve always had a slight packrat mentality and it was really difficult for me to let go of some things – what if they had value? What if I realized I could use them after we’d tossed them. And so much of the serious junk got tossed out – but I kept a pile of things for eBay in the off chance that I’d one day put it all online.

Nearly 5 years later, that still hasn’t happened. I have sold hardly anything from that pile – and in the meantime we’ve added even more stuff to our house. I don’t even want to think about the huge pile of boxes in our attic, the graveyard of outdated computer equipment and the other things that we haven’t touched in nearly 5 years time because we have no clue what is up there anymore. Some of the boxes have been packed for nearly 10 years – how could it possibly be anything we still need? Yet there it still sits.

The mind is a curious thing – and when our homes are cluttered, it brings clutter to our minds as well. Not quite a year ago, my husband and I renovated our living room. We love watching movies and have a rather substantial DVD collection – but what do you do with all those cases? We also had furniture that was simply ill-fitting for the room since the space is long and narrow.

So we decided to finally change things around, removed the majority of the furniture from the room, made some people on FreeCycle very happy and found ourselves with a huge amount of floor space afterward which was ideal for our growing daughter to play in. It immediately changed the way we felt when we were in the room, which had become a place of dread and despair, and also seemed to have an impact on our lives in general. We felt like a weight had been lifted and actually started sleeping better at night. It wasn’t that the room was a bad place – it was just cluttered up with unnecessary things that we no longer needed.

This past weekend, I tackled our mudroom which often becomes a catch all for tools and other random things as we pass through. It’s a project I have to continuously pay attention to. And before I started, we’d come to the point that you could barely walk by the pile of junk in the middle of the floor. Only one strip of blue carpet was still available for traffic which was just getting crazy. So I put a bunch of stuff into the barn and where ever it belonged in the first place — and there is still clearly some work to be done. But hopefully I can talk Stefan into putting up the other shelf with me sometime in the very near future, giving us a whole lot more storage and finally making this room complete.

Decluttering is a process that simply cannot be done overnight. You didn’t collect all of those things in one day, so there is no reason to think that you can clear all the clutter out of your life in just 24 hours – it won’t happen.

You may already have a grip on the clutter situation. Maybe you set rules for yourself like getting rid of two things every time you decide to bring something new into the house. I think that’s a fantastic idea and I totally applaud you for being on top of this potentially snowballing situation which can seriously hold back your joy in life. I hope to someday live without constant thoughts of the clutter lurking in each room and not be ashamed of a messy house just because I simply cannot find a place to put things away. I knew before I got started that I had to get a grip on the things spilling out of closets, taking up precious storage space while they waited to be rediscovered and actually USED.

Although it can sometimes be hard to let things goes, I am fairly certain that you will find that the fewer possessions you have, the easier it is to keep your life organized, clean and serene. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and cozy inside, never waking up in a panic about needing to clean the house or having a cleaning frenzy because someone is coming by on short notice? How about never having to worry about your house being out of order because everything has its place – and knowing that it’s ok for people to stop by unannounced because your home will still sparkle and shine?

Who wouldn’t like to have more time to do the things they love, and spend less time doing the not so fun stuff like housework? Or are you a big fan of dusting and picking up after your family?

If you’re ready to take the plunge into decluttering but just don’t know where to start, Mimi Tanner has written Declutter Fast, one of the original ebooks that began the entire decluttering phenomenon that you often read about today. She honestly wants people to gain control of the chaos in their lives and has put together a great ebook which is over 70 pages long. It’s everything you need to start walking down the path toward a clutter-free home.

She teaches you how to go step-by-step, room-by-room to get a grip on the clutter, how to purge it out and ways to organize what you’re keeping so you can actually find it and use it when you need it. You can even teach your children how to start eliminating the mess and clutter in their rooms so that they hopefully never end up having to completely re-boot their home one day.

This book will light a fire under you and literally compel you to take action. It also provides you with tools that you will really use now and in the future. But if for some reason it’s not for you or you just can’t follow the simple steps, all you’ve got to do is send an email to Mimi requesting a refund within 60 days of your purchase and you’ll get your money back. No harassment, no begging – just quick and easy.

Stop putting off happiness and stifling success in your life! Find your path to freedom by starting to declutter your home today and you’ll never look back!

Note: The links in this post are via an affiliate link, and I do receive a portion of each sale to help keep this blog going. I really appreciate your support.