Straightening Up for Company

My husband and I had a few people over for a cocktail party last week. The process we went through put me in mind of a blog post I wrote over 10 years ago called Decluttering for the Holidays.

In that post, I wrote: “At a talk I gave earlier this year, a woman asked me how to ensure that she and her husband regularly keep their apartment free of clutter. I advised her to give a dinner party once a month.”

I remember that moment vividly. The audience laughed because they thought I was kidding. But I explained that having company come over is the best way to focus your mind on putting everything away. And doing it monthly will ensure that the clutter never gets too bad.

In my earlier blog post, I wrote that you should focus on the common areas where guests congregate. But that wasn’t going to work for our cocktail party last week because we wanted to show off our renovation. That meant we were going to be bringing guests into every room.

In the week leading up to the party, I made a mental note of everything that was out of place. Then in the two days before the party, I made the time to put things away or throw them away.

In some cases, that meant reading magazines and newsletters that come in the mail and accumulate on the end table next to my sofa. In other cases, it meant attending to the papers that accumulate on my desk because an action is required.

The hardest things to tackle are the “postponed decisions”. Those are the items that hang around because I just haven’t taken the time to decide what to do with them. In my home, that mainly manifests as boxes that stack up in the corner of my home office, usually products that I have not committed to keeping.

The apartment looked so good after we straightened up for company that I’m thinking we want to have people over more often!