A huge focus of spring cleaning is always the dreaded (or for me loved) process of de-cluttering and purging. There are tons of methods out there: having a capsule wardrobe, getting rid of a certain number of items a day, following the KonMari method (which we actually did and it helped a lot), and so on. Whatever the method, we have learned a few tried and true things when it comes to your stuff:

• A great way to not let things get cluttered in the first place is to be very carful about what you let through the front door. Whether it is a well-intentioned bag of hand me downs, a pile of library books, or your kids craft project from church, these things can easily pile up on the kitchen counter.
• One of the best ways to keep your house in order is to have a place for everything. Usually the clutter that piles up the most for us (with the exception of the kids toys which end up everywhere) is things that don’t have a place so they just end up rotating from the kitchen counter to the dining table to the couch and back to the kitchen counter (please tell me I’m not the only one that seems to repeat this cycle).
• When in doubt, throw it out. This was usually my dad’s motto in regards to mysterious foods found in the back on the refrigerator, but I think it applies here. If you are vacillating about whether to keep something or not, chances are you don’t really love it that much, but are keeping it around because it was a gift, you think it might come of use sometime in your life, your are hoping you fit back into it someday, etc. If you don’t immediately know right away that you love something and want it around, you probably won’t miss it once its gone.

In our experience, the process of letting some things go that we had been hanging onto was very freeing. We found that when there was less stuff: less to trip over, less to pick up, less to fold, less to look at, less to find a place for, less to distract us, there was more time for rest, calm, and focusing on the people, not the things, that surround us.