Clutterbug of Colorado

Evergreen Co Professional Home Organizer

Janice Kaup is the Owner of Clutterbug of Colorado, LLC. Janice has been an organizer since childhood. She has recently realized the benefits of decluttering and how that optimizes the organizing phase. She went from a four-drawer file cabinet full of papers to an 8.5″x11″ bin for paper files! And no important files were thrown away.

Janice lives in beautiful Evergreen, Colorado. She has 2 wonderful daughters, a husband (who’s pretty wonderful too), and a Brittany Spaniel named Penny.

Janice works with clients to understand why clutter is taking over their lives and improve systems to make lasting changes.

Helpful Organizing & Decluttering Tips:

If you want to start decluttering and organizing on your own, here are a few tips:

If you have guests coming to stay with you or company coming over for holidays, I’d say start with the guest bedroom. Then do the kitchen. Then do common rooms like living room or dining room.

If you don’t have guests coming, declutter your whole house:

Sort by category, not location, in this order throughout your whole house:

1. Clothes
2. Books
3. Papers
4. Misc
5. Kitchen
6. Mementos

To start in any room:

1. Get three boxes, bins or trash bags

• One box/bin/bag is trash
• One box/bin/bag is recycle
• One box/bin/bag is donation

2. Everything in that room that doesn’t belong – see a) b) c) Guidelines below – will go in those boxes/bins/bags. The idea is to get rid of stuff that doesn’t belong. Don’t even think about organizing at this point. Things need to be gone from your house before you can organize what’s left.

3. Make sure you aren’t keeping things just because you have the space. It is far better to have space between items – space between clothing in the closets, space between items in a drawer, etc. Space lets your eyes see exactly what’s there. Filling up space makes it harder to see what’s there. And, if you end up buying more things (AGHH!! NO!!!), you won’t have a place for them.
4. You will NOT have a set place to put the remaining things yet. That’s ok. At least you’re left with what you cherish and enjoy. Where to put those things will come later so move on to the next room or category before organizing anything at all.