House Cleaning Guide for a Pack Rat

If you're someone who keeps mementoes and stores old newspapers and magazines and keepsakes, then you're a packrat. Unless you think like a librarian and catalogue all that you keep, and unless you're house is 3/4's storage area and 1/4 living quarters, keeping everything you own may not be a good idea. It's time to do some house cleaning. How do you decide what to throw and keep? Here's a guide.

Allot one or two days to deciding what to dispose of and what to keep. This can be hard, even for those who think they know where everything is placed, or hidden, in their homes. But do you really need every single picture and high school trophy and kindergarten costume? Sit down and look around your house. There's a limit to the acceptability of the excuse: "But I love these stuff. I can't throw them away." Sure you do, and that's why there's barely anywhere in your house to sit, and old stuff collected over the years mean dust and mold.

Donate, sell, dispose. Old toys, old books, old clothes, you can donate to a local school or give to the Salvation Army. Other stuff like old furniture and paintings you can sell in a garage sale. You might make some money there. The key thing is that, since you won't be needing everything at once, then there must be a way to store them for later retrieval, or just dispose of them since you can easily find them again when you need them. This leads to point number three, below.

That's why we have scanners. Old documents and newspaper clippings, magazine articles, old pictures, all these you can scan and save in your hard drive, leaving you with more free space in your house. Since most scanning programs have optical character recognition, and because you can name the files of the scanned items, you can find these scans when you need them later. Either you browse them in your PC or print them. There's no need for so much paper in your house.

That's why we have the Internet and the library. As for information you keep and like to look at for later, most of them can be found online, and in the case of the books, in the library. When you can't just let go of those hard-to-find books and antiques, maybe you should consider having someone else keep them, like your room in your parents' house. Or try to rent some storage area. That way, there's room in your house for new stuff. What kind of packrat is not open to getting new stuff in her house?

Now you see that, even for a packrat, some house cleaning is indeed possible.