Day 24 – Clear the clutter

This post is part of a 31 day series – “31 days to decorate your home on a budget.”  You can read all the posts in this series here.

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So my tip today on how to decorate your home is easy, and better yet, it doesn’t have to cost a dime!  BUT does involve a little time and elbow grease.    Your house will look better, feel better, even look more expensive just by following this simple tip…

Keep it CLEAN and CLUTTER-FREE!

Not exactly what you were wanting to hear, right?  You were wanting that “get rich quick”, lose 20 today pounds by eating brownies, magical cure right?  Me too!    But unfortunately, just as those schemes don’t work, our homes doesn’t magically clean or declutter itself or stay clean either.

So I could just show you some of my messy, cluttered rooms right now, but that would involve me actually cleaning them so I could take an “after” picture    (I am soooo writing this post to me today too, just so you know! )  But I do have a good example of my kitchen clean-up from January.

Clutter everywhere!  Dirty dishes in the sink, on the counters, and just clutter!

Rearranged some things, did the dishes, dealt with all the clutter, and doesn’t it look 10 times better?

Before:

After!  Of course removing the non-kitchen junk helped, but just minimizing stuff on the fridge and on the counters makes the whole room look better.

Another before (don’t mind the open cabinets – I don’t actually plan to have open shelving, but as I said, our house was a bank owned home and was missing the doors when we bought it.  They are on the to-do list, but I am thinking of adding some glass doors paneled doors.)

After

And here is one of the best ways to clean up the your kitchen – DECLUTTER the fridge!   (Is there even a fridge under all that stuff??)

110% better!!  (And I have kept it this way – yay!)

I even added this little vignette behind the sink – finally liked how it was arranged!  Right now it is decorated for fall, as I showed you in this post.

Soooo…. what are you waiting for?  You don’t need to run to the store, you don’t need any money, just roll up those sleeves and get to work!   Clean out that clutter!

I cleaned out our pantry, my coupons, and under the kitchen sink yesterday and plan to conquer our closet, dresser drawers, bathroom cabinets and change out winter clothes today.  2 bags of coupons for recycling and 1 bag of trash – I love throwing stuff away!

Decluttering – it’s FREE, my house looks better, and I feel better!  

If you need some extra motivation, watch an episode or two of “Hoarders”. I watched a few minutes of a show yesterday, and couldn’t stop cleaning/decluttering afterwards!

And if you are trying to get on a daily schedule of  cleaning your home (not decluttering – cleaning) try this method – “15 minutes of cleaning: How to have an fake, immaculate clean house all the time”

Will you join me in cleaning today??  What area do you need to work on?

{cj}