How I Learned to Declutter My House With These Simple Tips

By: Penny Scott

Decluttering a whole house can seem overwhelming. BUT if it's broken down into bite size chunks, it doesn't seem so bad. These tips helped me declutter my house. Hopefully you'll find them just as useful.

#1. Start with decluttering for 15 minutes a day. It's enough time to achieve something. It's short enough that we can all fit it into our busy schedules. If you do this one thing, it becomes a good habit. It will also ensure you keep your home clutter free in the future.

#2. Pick one room for your 15 minutes a day sessions and stick to it until it's decluttered. It doesn't really matter which room you start with.

#3. Declutter storage space first. Once you get control of drawers, cabinets and closets it will be so much easier to find a home for everything.

#4. Be ruthless in deciding what to keep and let go. You can't succeed at decluttering unless you’re willing to let stuff go.

#5. Make it easy to get rid of stuff. Designate space for items you want to sell, donate to charity, give away, or send to the recycling bin.

#6. Deal with paper. Little and often works best. Paper causes a lot of clutter. Bills, invoices, receipts... it's so easy to get out of control. Get a simple system going for incoming mail. You'll need a bin and a 2 tier tray. One tray for items that need action, the other for documents that need to be filed. Set up a filing system. Use a diary for scheduling actions, like paying bills.

#7. As soon as you bring something new into the house, set aside storage space for it. Always keep it in its place when not in use.

For more decluttering tips, check out the wildly popular “DeClutter FAST! How To Get Your Home In Order Almost Immediately” ebook.

Tips for Successfully Dieting the Natural Way

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” is an old adage that applies to many of life’s principles – including weight loss. You can join a gym, but it doesn’t help if you never go. You can turn down dessert, but it doesn’t matter if you load up your salad with croutons and hi-fat dressing. You can take diet pills and buy infomercial gadgets, but they are not effective if you’re not motivated to do it on your own.

In her article, Effective Ways to Lose Weight Naturally, Tracy Rose provides several helpful tips designed to get you on the road to dieting success. One of my favorite tips is tracking your calorie intake. I’ve been doing this for the past three weeks and have lost 7 pounds! There are several online weight tracking sites, but my favorite is The Daily Plate (I use the free version).

Read the article in its entirety to see what other tips can help you get on the dieting road to success!

Winter Tips for Our Furry Friends

Without a doubt, this winter season is one of the worst the nation has seen in many years. Our furry canine friends are also feeling the cold bite of Mother Nature and need some tender, loving, cold-weather care using some of these tips from The Write Essentials.

10 Healthy (and 10 Terrible!) Vending Machine Snacks

It's crunch time, and the snack machine is whispering your name. Pushing the wrong buttons could be a diet disaster -- so check out these top 10 nutritional nightmares, and the 10 smartest snacks from Fitness Magazine.

10 Tips to Create To-Do Lists Like a Pro

While creating and using to-do lists is relatively simple, there are some tips and tricks you can use to multiply their effectiveness. In his article, 10 Tips to Create To-Do Lists Like a Pro, Daniel Scocco shares the 10 tips he learned with to-do lists over the years, including how to prioritize tasks, what to focus on, being realistic, and choosing the right medium.

Click here: 10 Tips to Create To-Do Lists Like a Pro!

Tips for Keeping Your Aging Pet Healthy

We’re not the only ones getting older – so are our beloved pets, and at a much faster rate. Just as with our own health care, our aging canines and furry felines need regular check ups and screenings so they can also enjoy a longer, healthier life. In the article, Pet Protection: Tips for Keeping Your Aging Pet Healthy, by Sarah Nightingale (written for the AVALANCHE-JOURNAL), you can find some great tips on the importance of giving your aging pets extra TLC, including dental care, common disorders, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and other helpful information.

Click here to read the article: Pet Protection: Tips for Keeping Your Aging Pet Healthy

8 Tips for Planning a Weekly Dinner Menu

Last week on the Busy Moms Recipes chat group, we talked about the benefits of planning a weekly menu which included saving time and money, as well as eating healthier meals. Planning your weekly meals in advance also saves on stress because you don’t have to worry about what to fix for dinner each night – you will already know and have all of the ingredients on hand. Here are some ideas to help you get into the “groove” of menu planning:

1. Start by making a list of your family’s favorite meals. Then browse through cookbooks and online recipe sites (such as http://www.busymomsrecipes.com/) to find ideas for a variety of meals your family might enjoy based on their tastes and dietary restrictions. The longer your list of dinner ideas, the better variety your family can enjoy.

2. Consider a daily theme: Mondays are pasta; Tuesdays are chicken; Wednesdays are something easy in the crockpot; Thursdays are a new recipe; etc.

3. Get the family involved by assigning each member a day to pick a meal. Even if your five-year-old chooses spaghetti each and every Monday, who cares? He’ll have a vested interested in the meal planning, as will the others.

4. Take an inventory of the pantry, fridge, and freezer to see what foods you already have on hand and plan meals around what is available or needs to be used up first. For example, if you have some bacon and/or eggs that will expire soon, plan on making a simple Quiche Lorraine.

5. Pull out the newspaper’s weekly store flyers and coupons so that you can plan budget-friendly menus around current sales. This strategy is great for make-ahead meals. If the ground beef is on sale, buy it in bulk and freeze some of it in one-pound portions or hamburger patties. Cook the remaining ground beef to be frozen and used later in tacos or spaghetti recipes.

6. Jot down the meal plans on a calendar so that you can see what days coincide with different activities. If Susie has soccer practice on Tuesday or you attend church on Wednesdays, this may affect what you plan on serving for dinner that night. My husband also appreciates this because then he knows what not to eat for lunch on a particular day. For example, if I’m having grilled salmon for dinner, he knows not to order a fish sandwich for lunch.

7. Keep track of your weekly menus so that you can simply repeat them when necessary. Once you have a couple of month’s worth of menus, you can rotate them without your family getting tired of the meals.

8. Create a shopping list based on your weekly menu plan and stick to it!

Copyright 2010 Charlene Davis. All rights reserved. Links to articles on this site are welcome; however, articles may not be used, reproduced, or reprinted without permission.

Creative Tips for Leftovers

Once upon a time, the word “leftovers” conjured up visions of dried, leathery beef and rubbery pasta that had family members groaning in disappointment. Today, however, with cooks becoming more creative and stretching meals into two or three dinners, leftovers are earning a much better reputation.

• Crush up leftover chips (i.e. potato, tortilla, corn) and dredge pieces of chicken or pork in them that have been dipped in egg. Bake chicken or pork in a lightly greased casserole dish at 375 degrees for 30-40 minutes. Note: can also use leftover crushed chips as a casserole topping.

• Toss leftover rice or pasta into vegetable soup or chicken broth for a quick, hearty lunch. Make a rice pudding with leftovers or add olives, pimentos, or other veggies for a cold rice salad.

• Leftover baked potatoes can become twice-baked potatoes or chopped up with onions and garlic for delicious hash browns.

• Leftover chicken broth or wine can be frozen in ice cube trays. Remove and seal in freezer bags for a quick and tasty addition to recipes.

• Freeze leftover grapes or berries on a cookie sheet. Once frozen, transfer to a freezer bag or airtight container to be used later in smoothies, recipes, or as a quick snack.

• Did you know that raw eggs can be frozen whole? This is great if you have a carton of eggs getting ready to expire. Once frozen, just take out what you need, thaw, and use.

• Cut stale bread into cubes; brush with olive oil; sprinkle garlic or onion powder on top; and bake at 400 degrees until golden brown. You can also use other toppings on these tasty croutons such as parmesan cheese, oregano, dill, and/or parsley.

• Save leftover bacon to be crumbled and used in salads, soups, or a pot of beans.

• Freeze leftover meatloaf to be crumbled up and added another time to spaghetti sauce.

• Keep a large Ziploc bag in the freezer to store leftover scraps such as vegetables, rice, potatoes, pasta, meat, pork, or chicken. When the bag is full dump everything into a large soup pot; add beef, chicken, or vegetable broth and your favorite seasonings for a scrumptious soup. Note: can also add tomato sauce or canned tomatoes.

To get some great tips on how to safely handle leftovers check out An Education on Leftovers at Busy Moms Recipes.

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Copyright 2009 Charlene Davis. All rights reserved.

Filing Away Last Year

Stress, stress, stress! Good grief, every which way you turn is to be greeted with more stress. There is no avoiding it with sick kids, overextended credit cards, work deadlines, and life in general making its daily demands. So, we need to find viable solutions to deal with all of these hassles. For me, minimizing some of the pressure as much as possible has been the best alternative. And I’m doing that by trying to simplify and streamline specific areas of my life.

During the past year I have worked on my home one room at a time by decluttering and reorganizing everything to its best possible advantage. My mission is almost accomplished and I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. The last room to receive a complete overhaul and makeover is my office, which still looks like something from a disaster photo-op. But even in there I have started implementing small strategies to make this an easier transition than it looks. And it looks bad.

A couple of years ago, I initiated a new filing plan that my longtime friend, Julie Stiles Mills, shared in Bible study. We were discussing the book, Living With Less: The Upside of Downsizing Your Life, by Mark Tabb (Broadman & Holman), and how to get more out of life by choosing to live with less. (This is an excellent book that is scripturally based.) I was complaining about my resident paper monster and how I had several years of filing piled up waiting to be crammed into about a hundred or so folders. Julie’s solution was simple: Don’t do it.

Julie said that folders should only be used for paperwork that will be used actively such as bank statements and medical records, and to segregate other types of business and client materials. But to assign a folder to every single piece of paper that will probably never be touched again is unnecessary and time-consuming. She recommended sorting the filing by year and then pulling out only the pertinent papers that needed folders. The rest could go into a box or expandable file folder with the year marked on it and set aside for easy access, if necessary. If I needed to find something at a later date, I would know exactly where to go and look for it.

I have to tell you that this filing method has been so liberating! Such a simple solution to an overwhelming task.

Shortly after that discussion, Julie wrote a 3-part series entitled, “Don’t file paper at home anymore” at Pragmatic Compendium. In her charming and humorous style, she goes into a lot of detail on how to easily and efficiently tame the resident paper monster, and (this is the best part) teach other family members how to follow it! Here are the links:

Don’t file paper at home anymore: Part 1

Don’t file paper at home anymore: Part 2

Don’t file paper at home anymore: Part 3