If you’d like to celebrate the 4th of July in a nonflammable, indoor manner, try declaring your independence from #clutter with 7 Tips from Tailored Living. First, you must admit that there is a problem, then set house rules asking every family member to pick up after themselves. Next, eliminate unnecessary items from each room, putting stuff that doesn’t belong in a particular place where it should be and getting rid of items that no longer serve a useful purpose. Purge the closets and garage and contact ClothingDonations.org for a #donation pickup. Finally, make an honest assessment of your storage needs to maximize the space you have for the remaining stuff.
Tag: clothing donations
Get the Kids to Declutter on Their Summer Vacation
School’s out (for the summer)! And if you have kids, that means you’ll be looking for something to keep them busy for six or eight hours on most weekdays. Summer camp, a family vacation and other diversions are great options, but they can’t fill every one of those hours fast enough. This summer, get your kids involved in a good #decluttering.
You can already hear the collective groan you might hear as you suggest such a chore. But if you organize and incentivize the task, you might find that it gets done faster and more completely — and then everyone can really enjoy the summer fun.
Set a goal; the Making Lemonade blog suggests a summertime target of reducing stuff by one-third. Kids tend to accumulate lots of toys, clothing and other junk that they outgrow quickly, leading to overstuffed closets and drawers, so extra stuff should be easy to weed out. Put each of them in in charge of choosing what to keep.
Find a rainy day or quiet weekend to have everyone pitch in and declutter their personal spaces, or simply set a deadline. As an incentive, put a garage or yard sale on the calendar; anything that the kids are able to declutter and sell will mean extra money in their pockets — money they can spend on whatever they wish.
Toys can present an especially challenging decluttering task, says Simply Well Balanced. Sort them into categories — building toys, stuffed animals, craft supplies, etc. — and ask your child to keep only a limited number of favorites. Those few items will go back to the closets and shelves, and the rest will be bagged and boxed for sale or #donation. Anything broken or unusable can go directly into the trash.
After you hold your sale and distribute the proceeds, you can box up the leftover clothing, toys and other household items and schedule a ClothingDonations.org pickup. A driver will stop by on the appointed day, load up your stuff and leave a donation receipt for tax purposes. That lightly used merchandise will then be resold to fund veterans’ programs.
This, in itself, can be a lesson in personal responsibility for younger children, decluttering coach Gari Julius Weilbacher told WHYY. “It’s wonderful to teach kids from a young age about making meaningful donations. Involving kids in packing up the books, toys and clothes that they are no longer using can engage them in the process.”
Get Ready for Garage Sale Season
The weather is finally heating up in many parts of the country that suffered a long and inclement winter and spring. A dreary spring is great for spring cleaning, of course, but are you ready to make the most of the new season — garage sale season?
Here’s hoping that you have been able to go through your home room by room to sort out some of the excess junk you’ve accumulated over the months and years. If you haven’t given that stuff away already, now’s the time to make some money off it.
To get your sale ready, get everything you want to sell in one place. There are some things that will need to be trashed, of course, but you may be surprised at what people will want to buy, says FrugalFun.com.
“Try to sell everything! What’s junk to one person is often someone else’s treasure. Even broken appliances can be sold for parts. And don’t throw out your old magazines. Stick them all in a box and sell them for a quarter apiece.”
Arrange your selling space — whether it’s the garage, driveway or yard — like a store, with tables, racks and aisles to group similar stuff. Sort items into areas: clothing, tools, kitchenwares, electronics, knickknacks, jewelry, etc.
Post bright, colorful signs around the neighborhood, and save extra grocery bags for people’s purchases. Play some background music at your sale and greet shoppers to put them at ease while they browse.
If you plan on having more than one sale this season, you won’t have to haggle on prices much. But if your goal is to clear that crop of excess stuff (#clutter) out once and for all, allow shoppers to bargain and slash prices in the sale’s final hours.
You won’t sell everything, so contact ClothingDonations.org to schedule a pickup in the days immediately following the sale. Not only will your donation of lightly used clothing and household goods help veterans, it will reduce the temptation to take any of the excess merchandise back into your home.
Garage sale season lasts from now into fall, so get ready to get rid of the junk you don’t need. Whether you stage a single sale or decide to make garage sales a regular outlet for #decluttering, you’ll be happy how streamlined your life can become — and have a few extra bucks to spend, too!
Declutter to Increase Storage Space
The curse of having too much stuff is common among Americans. And if you don’t keep that stuff organized, it becomes #clutter — and clutter can cloud the mind. That’s why the first step in any plan to get yourself, your storage space and your home organized should be to #declutter. Go room by room, the Spruce says, “and if rooms are large or complicated, you should start by breaking them up into zones. Work quickly and decide which items to toss and which to keep.” As you eliminate junk and free up space, donate any castoffs that may still be useful to someone else to ClothingDonations.org.
Valuing Donated Goods for Tax Deduction
Major tax-preparation programs and applications from companies such as H&R Block, TaxAct and TurboTax offer valuation guides for used goods like those you often #donate to ClothingDonations.org, offering a range of values based on condition. Each pair of pants, for example, is worth about $5–$12 at resale, and that amount is deductible. Be forewarned, however, that the threshold for deductible donations of lightly used clothing and goods is typically $500, so try to #declutter often. If you would like to make a larger charitable donation, consult IRS Publication 526 for information.