Stunningly Helpful Magazine Clutter Clearing Tips. !?

Magazine clutter busting tips - do not apply!

7th November 2013

I recently saw on the cover of a magazine (Prima Feb 2013)  ’30 Ways to clear clutter’. 

‘Hmmm’ I thought ‘I wonder if ANY of these ideas would help somebody like Imelda’.  I am aware that many of these type of articles are just attempts to sell you something but let’s give them a chance shall we?  Here goes:

1) Do you have a narrow hall? – He does.  The article says hallways can fill up with coats and jackets and it suggests a wall rack.  Good plan I guess except if he bought a rack it would add to the junk for five plus years until he got around to fitting it.
 2) Most of us have more shoes than we ever wear’…
     ‘Let wellies drip dry out of the way on a rack’.  You try finding a space anywhere near a wall to hang a welly rack or even being able to get near enough to a wall to install one.   If there were such a rack it would be full of papers and letters which had overflowed from the letter rack.
3) Christmas decorations stored in transparent boxes under the stairs are easy to locate’. Yes I am sure they would be if you could actually get into the cupboard under the stairs to put them in in the first place.  If you could open the door it would be one thing however Imelda has not been able to get to the door in ten years let alone open it.  Heaven only knows what lurks in the darkness.  Anyway Imelda has his own solution to this one - Keep the decorations up all year round and only switch the lights on at Christmas.  A fantastic solution,  not only do you not have to find anywhere to put them but you can just build up you card collection year after year and so it looks like you have a million friends.  Imelda still has cards on the window sill from people who died years ago.
   4) Know where your keys are by storing them in this brightly coloured flowered key storage box.' – Er I think he would lose the box before it got as far as the wall.


The Bedroom
 The bedroom – the article says ‘your environment is key to getting restful sleep and your bedroom should feel like a sanctuary… 
5) Keep your room free from clutter and junk particularly the space around your bed where tidiness clears your mind and helps you let go of the day.' Clutter, apparently is often distracting and creates mental busyness – the opposite of what is required for restful sleep. – You don’t say!  So where exactly do you put the 5ft high piles of junk mail, newspapers, old chairs, slippers, boxes and whatever?  Where do you put the 100 or so newspapers which have already started to creep onto your bed because there is no room for them on the piles on the floor?  When I cleared a space around his bed it took me two days and that was with the help of four friends. I remember a scream of joy went up when we discovered floorboards and not carpet in there.
 6) Take advantage of the space beneath the bed'…….  Space???
 7) Try on the contents of your wardrobe, donate the reject pile to charity including anything which needs altering as the chances are it won’t get done.'  Well the last bit hit the nail on the head but…………… ‘reject pile’?
 8) Tallboys – more space saving as they take up less floor space.' – Unless there isn’t enough floor space to get one in the house.
 9) Don’t forget to clean out the spare room.' – the article says according to a recent survey of 1000 homeowners, 81% could not list more than five items they had stored in their spare room. – Neither could Imelda but it doesn’t mean he can’t think of an excuse to keep whatever it is.
10) Shoes will last longer if you care for them properly.' – Ahem! – It suggests shoe storage boxes with windows in at £10 a box.   All very well unless you have 197 odd shoes.  The windows would be pretty pointless buried at the bottom of a pile.
 11) A storage coffee table' – excellent until there is so much stuff on top that you can’t open the  lid.  The stuff inside is then lost for ever.
 12) TVs are getting slimmer but larger.'   IMELDA TAKE NOTE!  It suggests saving space by hanging them on the wall.  Er – would that be all NINE of them in the living room then?
 13) Ornaments – Less is more – never a truer word spoken.
14) Too many shoes?  Ha ha ha that is the statement of the century.  It goes on to say that once you have whittled down the stash you should store them in a cabinet. (‘Whittled down’ – What the heck does that mean?) It suggests one which can hold up to ten pairs (cost £133).  Ok so that’s ten pairs sorted – what about the other 177 shoes?

     

  15) Don’t let bills and letters go astray – file them in a letter rack’.  Well that would need to be about 6ft x 4ft then.

7

The Living Room

1      Organise drawers with these handy drawer organisers – which wouldn’t fit in the house let alone the drawers.

         'Check the medicine cabinet regularly.' ( I guess this means at least every twenty years or so going by Imelda’s cabinet).

The Kitchen

1      'Use every bit of the kitchen to best advantage planning storage right up to the ceiling.' – Oh dear God please don’t encourage him.

  The other tips were not very helpful - I had given up taking the article seriously, I think either you have a clutter free house or you don't.  Nobody needs to be told by a magazine how to de-clutter their house. Interesting but not useful.