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Hi. I'm Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we're
going to talk about the myth of spring cleaning. So there's this idea that in the spring you're
supposed to throw open all the doors and windows of your house and scrub everything down and
clean and organize everything in your house at the same time. And I'm here to tell you
that you're off the hook and you do not need to take a week off of work to make this happen.
Instead, I would like to suggest that maintenance is a better approach.
So here's my favorite quote on this topic, and that is: "Hard work is often the easy
work you did not do at the proper time." So there's a reason that we brush our teeth twice
a day every day instead of saving up all of our tooth-brushing for once a month and doing
it 60 times in a day. It's the same reason that we don't do one annual colossal lawn
mowing. These things require regular maintenance and so does your house. So you want to be
cleaning and organizing everything year-round on a regular basis [POP] so that you don't
have to have this big overwhelming once-a-year spring cleanup thing. Instead, let's focus
on the projects that really do make sense to do in the spring for seasonal reasons and
do everything else throughout the rest of the year.
So the ones that make a lot of sense this time of year are your home office, because
it's tax time and you're already in there touching a lot of your paperwork. You might
as well freshen that up. Your closet makes sense because you may be switching out your
seasonal clothing. And then of course your garage, because it's warmer weather, you're
spending more time outside.
So I'm here in my garage right now. In a previous video recently we talked about one of the
biggest problems in garages being what I call "boneless spaces," meaning that the space
has no skeleton, it has no infrastructure, such as shelving, or cabinets, and so what
you want to do is look at the pros and cons here of open shelving versus closed cabinets.
So I'm going to go over that a little bit with you. Here is a great option for open
shelving. It's the ClosetMaid heavy duty wire shelving. You can cover as much or little
of a wall with this as you want, it's completely customizable, and reconfigurable if you change
your mind over time. It's wonderful if you spend lots of time in your garage and you
want to have everything out visible and accessible. And the only con on this is that it is visible
and accessible. And if you're the kind of person who would rather come and go in your
car every day and have more of a clean look and feel with things kind of hidden behind
closed doors, then your closed cabinets might be more attractive for you. This is a great
option, the ClosetMaid Pro Garage System. And you can see that here. What I love the
most about this system and I look for in any garage cabinet is you want to have elevated
cabinets. These have little feet, little peg feet, and it keeps the cabinets off the floor.
You really want to make sure that because of garage flooding, you know, whether it's
rain or some kind of mysterious car fluid or something, you don't want to be getting
that in your cabinet wood and ruining your cabinets. So that's a great feature. They
have pegboard that goes with that. So you can configure this and customize this to your
garage and it's really affordable.
So you can look at open shelving, you can look at closed cabinets, but whatever you
do, get some kind of skeleton or infrastructure in your garage to make it work better for
you.
You can learn more in our whole play-list about garage stuff. We have that on our channel
at http://www.clutterdiet.tv.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.