Common Clutter: Living Rooms, Sitting Rooms, Family Rooms, and Dens

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Make the Common Area Special

This week’s assignment is to examine a common area of your home and work toward optimizing it for your use and the enjoyment of your family and your guests:

• Select a common area of your home that isn’t functioning the way you’d like it to work—for example, a living room where you’d like to entertain guests, but you’re not usually ready to do so.
• Make a list of the purposes for which you would like this space to be used. For reference, you might also brainstorm a list of functions that you would explicitly prefer the family not do here.
• Search for anything parked or stored in this room that isn’t used here. Assign any such item a new storage location elsewhere in your home, or set it aside to consider for donation or disposal.
• Assess the furniture in the room in terms of its usefulness and necessity. Reduce congestion by removing anything that isn’t serving an important or essential function.
• For any secondary activity you must do in this room (e.g., paying bills) design a storage solution that allows you to stash the materials you need while you’re using the room for its other main purposes.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.