Cleanse Your Home of these Five Types of Things

When a new year is coming, it feels like the perfect time to reflect, regroup, and refresh your life. Many of these goals will be personal or professional, but your home could use a few resolutions for itself. Clearing your home of clutter, getting rid of the excess, and letting go of some things that you don’t really need to be holding onto can not only cleanse where you live but it can help ease anxiety, too.

Kick out the Clutter

Getting rid of clutter is a choice that can have a surprisingly positive psychological impact in addition to freeing the flow and improving the functionality of all your home’s spaces. Make a plan of attack to go through all of the major rooms and spaces and begin sorting. Some of the easiest things to get rid of are duplicates or items of which you have too many. Whether gifts, back-ups, or mistakes, if you’re not using it, it can go.

Give or Sell if Possible

But don’t simply throw these things away. Consider if someone else can use it, you could possibly sell it online or through a network of friends and colleagues, or if it could be donated first. Select items that might not be clutter but that you don’t really need, either. Call or email around to ask the people you know, see if there is a market for the item online, and check out charity websites to see what kinds of items they regularly accept.

Safely Shred Sensitive Materials

When clearing clutter or cleaning, there are two areas you’ll want to create special circumstances for old paper files and old electronics. Both categories of items can contain personal information, and simply throwing them away or trying to recycle them could expose you to fraud and identity theft. There are numerous benefits of document shredding and using a professional data destruction company to take care of securely crushing and recycling your old technology, disks, and drives. Data can be recovered from intact files and drives that have been supposedly wiped, so it’s smart to handle these things properly. Collect them all together to reap the most benefits.

Give Things Back

It’s a great time to collect up all the things that you’ve borrowed from others and return them. These things tend to pile up and it might be weighing on you that you have them, even if they’re not always on your mind. You might not have seen, read, or used the things yet, but if it’s been a few to several months, maybe you can try again in the future.

Refresh the Fridge

Many people have a full fridge and it would be a lot easier to find things and a lot quicker to prepare recipes if the useless stuff was out of the way. Sort through the items in your fridge and throw out everything that has gone bad. Make sure to not confuse expiry dates and best before dates. Food can be eaten past its best before date, but you should start doing smell and touch tests to see if it’s truly turned. It’s also best for safety’s sake that you find anything moldy and get rid of it to avoid cross-contamination.

Take care of these five areas when you have some spare time over the holidays, and your house – and you – will feel cleansed for the new year!