New Year’s resolutions are easy to make, harder to keep, and after a few years (decades?) of making and breaking them, they can leave you demoralized. What lots of people don’t realize is that everyday goals and resolutions are easier to achieve if you have an organized life, starting with your home. So if you want to achieve your goals, follow these tips to clean your house. By doing so, you’ll clean out the mental “garbage” in your mind that can prevent you from making your New Year’s resolutions stick.
Make it a Team Effort
If a couple (dating or married) and/or a family can make this a joint project, cleaning up and organizing can be productive on many levels. Help each other. Start with just a room if doing the whole place is too overwhelming. In fact, even if you just fix up a bathroom, by actually doing it, and doing it well, you’ll gain a lot more energy in your life and collective lives that will serve you in other endeavors.
10 New Year’s Resolutions For Your Home
1. Clean out your closets — all of them! Give what you don’t use to a charity. There are plenty of them. If you can’t find one, call The Red Cross and ask where you can donate.
2. Make sure your hot water heater, water filter (if you have one), heating vents, and other “hidden” essential parts of your home are working properly.
3. Roof maintenance. This is a preventative measure that can save you lots of headaches down the road. An ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure when it comes to maintaining the roof over your head.
4. Clean your chimney. Yes, there are such things as chimney sweeps. Use them.
5. Clean the windows — or have them professionally cleaned.
6. Do your tree trimming and finish the landscaping you wanted to do.
7. Clean out the garage. Have a garage sale with everything you don’t need anymore in the house. Donate this stuff as well, or throw away anything that others wouldn’t want.
8. Book sweep. Go through your bookshelves and make a box of all the books you are not going to read again, and donate them to your library or sell them to a used book store. Use the money you make to buy new books you want to read.
9. Light bulb patrol. Replace burned-out bulbs (inside and out), and try to use fluorescent bulbs that save energy where possible. Adding outdoor lights can make your home safer by warding off criminals and making it less likely you’ll injure yourself on a crack or other items in the walkway.
10. Have an open house. Invite your friends and neighbors over – this will give you a little extra motivation to clean up knowing that you’re having company over. Make sure you invite all those people you’ve meant to call but haven’t gotten around to in the last year. After all, having a clean home is an even better New Year’s resolution if you can share it with those you love.
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Nicknamed “the new millennium’s Dear Abby” by the media, April Masini writes the critically acclaimed ‘Ask April’ advice column and answers readers’ questions on the free Ask April advice forum. Author of four books, including Date Out Of Your League (TurnKey Press, 0-9746763-0-6) and Think & Date Like A Man (iUniverse, 0-595-37466-2), April has been interviewed for over 2,700 articles and opinion pieces, radio and television shows, including those on FOX, ABC, CBS, MSN, Telemundo, and Univision — New York Times, New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Maxim and USA Today. April Masini is based in Naples, Florida.
Featured photo by Rubbermaid Products