Chances are you know how it feels to put on excess pounds. You're uncomfortable. Nothing fits right. Everything seems to take more effort.
Sharon Kreighbaum believes that's how it is with houses, too. She's written "Is Your House Overweight? Recipes for Low-Fat Rooms," a guide to putting a home on a clutter diet (Heather Lane Publishing, $24.99).
The book's premise is that a bloated house is an uncomfortable one. Clutter gets in our way, increases our stress and wastes our time, energy and resources.
The self-published book grew out of Kreighbaum's work as an interior designer and home stager, as well as her early experience as a kitchen designer. Through her Hudson, Ohio, staging business, Staged Makeovers, she mostly rearranges and redecorates homes for sale, but she said she's found that some clients want her services just to make their homes more livable.
A clutter-free home doesn't have to be a spare one, Kreighbaum insists. After all, the artist in her loves beautiful things, and she loves surrounding herself with them just as much as her clients do.
"You can live with luxury, but just enough that it's not clutter," she said.
Clutter, she said, comes from indecision. Things accumulate because we haven't decided how to handle them or where to put them. And when we don't make those decisions, she said, we set ourselves up for the frustration and wasted time of continually searching for things or having to deal with the consequences of our laxity.
So one of the keys to Kreighbaum's approach is assigning everything a home, which should be where you use the item or where you need it -- your purse and cellphone near the door, for instance, and your dishes within reach of the dishwasher.
