[00:00:00] Christine: Hey friends. Welcome back to the milspouse mastermind show. PCS season is almost here. And if you aren’t familiar with that term, permanent change of station, moving from one duty location to another. And so when I started thinking about this season and how many people are going to be effected by this over the next few months, I really wanted to put together a helpful guide to help you plan your PCS.

[00:00:29] If it’s been a while since you moved, if you’re preparing for your first move, if you’re getting ready for your first overseas move (OCONUS PCS), or you just want a refresher, that’s what we’re going to be focusing on in the next few weeks. Now today’s episode is actually applicable to everyone, whether you’re PCSing this year or not.

[00:00:54] Because today we’re diving into the topic of decluttering your home and doing this is going to help you in all aspects of your life, whether you’re moving or not, it’s going to help you show up as the person you want to be. It’s going to help you manage your home. It’s going to help you have a smoother PCS.

[00:01:15] It’s going to reduce your stress when you get to a new duty station and new location. So whether you’re prepping for PCS or you just know that you’re having trouble staying on top of managing everything on at the home, and you’re just struggling to keep everything clean and care for your self. Then you’re going to get a lot of value out of today’s episode.

[00:01:40] So what are you saying? Let’s dive into the show.

[00:02:35] Our mission at the MilSposue Mastermind Show is to help you navigate military life, get unstuck and craft a life with purpose. So if you are in this place of feeling stuck and unfulfilled, and you’re not sure what your next step needs to be. Then I want you to go to milspousemastermind.com/growth wheel. There, you will find a free assessment that walks you through every single area of your life.

[00:03:03] It breaks our life down into 10 separate areas and you assess how you’re doing in each area. So you can see where things are going well and where you’re actually struggling. And then you’ll get some practical suggestions for your next step to help you get unstuck. Because the truth is we don’t need to have all of the answers before we can take a step.

[00:03:29] We just need to know what that next step for us is in our current season. So that’s what this free assessment is designed to help you do figure out where it is that you are stuck so that you can take that next. And start moving towards discovering who you are meant to be.

Now, the reason I bring that up right now is that one of those 10 areas is your home environment and how your home environment currently makes you feel, whether you feel like you’re killing it at home, or whether your home just feels out of control, and you don’t know how to manage your time and your schedule and keeping up with the cleaning and the tidy.

[00:04:12] All of the things that go with managing your home. Now, I will not pretend to tell you that I have all of this figured out. I still have three young kids, and this is a battle every single day, every single week to stay on top of managing the home. But one thing that I have done, and continue to do on a regular basis is to declutter my home.

[00:04:35] And this makes such a huge difference because. One of the biggest factors in our ability to keep a clean and tidy home comes down to every single item, having a place that it goes. If something doesn’t have a place that it goes, adjust, sits out, or it moves from room to room and it starts to make space feel cluttered.

[00:04:57] So today we’re going to talk about how to declutter your home. Some practical tips that I have employed over the last few years. I do a deep dive into. Before, every single PCS. I was thinking about this the other day. And I think there’s only one PCS where I didn’t thoroughly declutter our house before we moved.

[00:05:21] And that was because a, we were only there for 10 months. I did a big declutter phase as we were moving into that house and I had a newborn baby and a husband that had just come home from a deployment. So that move was a little more chaotic and I didn’t really do that decluttering right before we moved, but every other move I’ve done these steps.

[00:05:46] And so we’re going to talk about how to declutter our home and prepare for our move today. Hopefully you will get a lot of value out of this. Um, if you are at a place where you have, um, you’re not in the car, you can grab a pencil and paper and take some notes. Let’s begin. And I want to start by talking about why decluttering is so good for us in general, and a lot of these concepts that I’m going to talk about today.

[00:06:17] Come from Marie Kondo’s book. The life-changing magic of tidying up while I’ve been decluttering. Uh, for our last several PCS is, let me see. Uh, we have, now we’re preparing for our seventh move in the almost 14 years that I’ve been together with my spouse. I finally, a couple of years ago, sat down and actually read through her book.

[00:06:41] And she has so many helpful pieces of advice when it comes to decluttering. Um, but the biggest thing was the why behind the decluttering. And she says putting our house in order positively affects all other aspects of our lives, including work and family. So how we take care of our home, how we declutter is not a vacuum, right?

[00:07:09] It impacts all these other areas of our life. This is why the growth wheel exists, because it shows us that all of these things. Elements of our life are connected and it’s easy to kind of silo them off and say, well, this is just this one area, but they all impact each other. And when we get our house or our room, when we feel like it’s cluttered, if you take a moment, you can feel how.

[00:07:38] Space impacts the way that you feel about the rest of your life. And on the flip side, when our home or our room where we’re working out of where we’re living out of, when that is uncluttered, when it is organized, It helps us show up for all of these other areas of our lives. And it helps us have the space to focus our inner state.

[00:08:05] So when our outside our home is cluttered, that’s going to impact how we show up. So that’s kind of the why behind why having a clean and organized house is important. And there’s two key steps to having a tidy home as she calls it. The two key steps are discarding and deciding where to store things. So for our purposes, we’re going to talk about.

[00:08:36] Decluttering, and then having a place for everything. And I, if you are in the middle of a PCs, then you will be able to figure out where that place is until you move. But the de-cluttering can come before you move now. Decide to get rid of a few more things after you move, but in my own experience and in the experience of talking with other spouses, having this part done before you move is really, really helpful.

[00:09:06] Number one, if you are stressed about your move and you’re wondering, what should I be doing? What steps am I supposed to be taking? I feel overwhelmed. This allows you to act. Be proactive to do something that’s going to reduce and release stress. Plus when you get to where you’re going, it can feel overwhelming as you’re trying to unpack, trying to figure out where to put things and your brain is already unload overload, trying to figure out all of the new things going on and trying to figure out on top of how you’re setting up a new home.

[00:09:40] You’re trying to figure out, okay, where do I go to get groceries and, and find my place in. Familiarity in our surroundings, right. You’re also trying to find new doctors and dentist and kids’ schools and all these other things that your brain doesn’t necessarily have the same amount of processing.

[00:09:59] Versus if you will take the time upfront to declutter before you move, then half the battle is already done. So if having a tidy home involves decluttering and putting things in a specific location, we can do half of that work before we ever move. So the process that Marie Kondo talks about. First of all picturing what it would look like to live in a clutter free space and then actually giving yourself a why, why do I want to live in that kind of space?

[00:10:36] What will it do for me? Spend a few minutes really thinking through this question, because if we start this process by focusing on, well, how do I choose what I get rid of and what should I keep. Already veered off course. We’ve already lost the why behind what we’re trying to. No, she goes on to say, there’s really only two reasons why we struggled to let something go.

[00:11:05] It’s either an attachment to our past, or it’s a fear for the future. Now, some people really are attached to the past and they have, you know, they want to hold onto all of this. Momentos from the past, not in my own life, having moved so many times, I over time get tired of me doing the same things from place to place.

[00:11:31] And so I don’t have as much of that attachment to the past where I see myself struggling more. Is that fear for the future? It’s the. Because we move so often. And because I’ve noticed that every house that we’ve lived in is laid out completely different. You have things that work for certain floor plans and certain layouts and not for others.

[00:11:56] And so that like desire to hold on to something because oh, maybe it’ll work in a future home, even if it doesn’t fit or there’s no place that it works in this home. And that’s especially true for me. When it comes to like storage baskets. Cause I love everything to be in cute little storage baskets, but every house is so different.

[00:12:20] And so trying to find those things that will work. Multiple layouts and cabinet sizes and drawer depths. And so I tend to hold onto things more out of a fear for the future than an attachment to the past. I don’t know what it would look like for you, but just keep those two things in mind. Let’s talk through my personal process of decluttering for a PCs move.

[00:12:49] So the first thing I do is make a list of every room in my house. Um, and every closet, if it’s not attached to her room. So I want to get an idea of how many spaces that I’m going to go through and then give myself a timeline to work through that. Now for me, a lot of this has been based on when we actually find out we’re going to move.

[00:13:17] And for me again, that has always been last minute. So I know you can go online and you can find PCs, checklists that talk about, okay, six months out, you’re going to do this five months out. You’re going to do this four months out. You’re going to do this. And those are all great. If you want to go find one of those checklist and follow it, that is great.

[00:13:37] Most of the time, we have not found out where we’re going until the last minute. And sometimes we know that we’re probably going to be moving. We just don’t have any official confirmation that it’s actually happening until the last minute. Um, so I have never started way. In advance, I guess probably this last move, uh, in 2020, it was when I started the earliest, because I knew that we were probably moving and I knew we needed to sell our house before we moved.

[00:14:07] And so I was approaching it from the. Part of window. I want to have put my house on the market and work backwards from that date rather than the date that we’re going to be PCs seeing. But what you do is figure out what your timeline is, and you can do this over months, or you can do it in a very short amount of time.

[00:14:30] You’re just going to have to do. More time to it, if you have a short amount of time, but you’re going to make your list of every room, every closet, and then what you need to get done each week to fit within your timeline. No, when you go in that room or that closet, you want to go through every single thing in that room and every single drawer within that space.

[00:14:54] And as you’re going through this stuff, you’re asking yourself these. Number one, have I used this in the last year, this was like the foundational question that my husband and I used to ask. And then it got a little more complicated because there are so many things that are dependent on living in a certain location.

[00:15:16] And then kids came along and, you know, hobbies that I had had before kids that were now on the back burner, I hadn’t used in a while. Closed. You’re constantly changing sizes when you’re pregnant, not pregnant, pregnant, not pregnant. And so that got a little harder to go by, but one of the questions you can ask is have I used this item in the last year?

[00:15:36] Um, for my kids’ stuff, I’m constantly asking myself or my kids still using this. Is this something that we need to hold on to? Or have they outgrown this? And it’s time to. Pass this along to somebody else. And then the third question is, does this bring me joy? Because we want to hold onto things because we love them.

[00:15:59] And not just because they exist and we might use them at some point in the future. This is really hard as a military family, when we’re moving a lot. There’s so many things that I would love for every purchase to be something that I absolutely love, but there’s so many purchases that are based on necessity or what’s available in the moment.

[00:16:23] But my goal is to continually be trying to move towards only having things that really bring me joy to keep and hold on to the things that I really love and let go of the rest and understand that it’s. Stuff. One of my favorite quotes from Marie Kondo is that the space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not the person we were in the past.

[00:16:54] So is the space that you were creating, helping you into who you are becoming into, who you want to be, or is it just reminders of who you used to. This is something that I like to think about. So let’s get back to you’re in your room. You’re going through everything. Now, if you have a lot of time, then, especially for clothes, I will pull everything out and go through it.

[00:17:20] If I am pressed for time, I’m not going to pull everything out and go through it. I’m just going to sort through it in the drawer and pull out things that I know I’m going to get. Um, because you’re gonna divide everything a couple of times, the first three things that you’re going to divide everything into is yes, this is definitely keep a B, this is a maybe or no, I’m getting rid of this.

[00:17:45] So, you know, you’re keeping your keep pile, you know, you’re getting rid of your purge pile and then you go back through the maybe. And either hold onto it or move it into the perch pile. And you’re going to do that for every space. Now, once you have the things that you are purging, that doesn’t mean you throw them away.

[00:18:06] Right? So some stuff might be going in the trash. Um, but you’re also going to have. Donate pile and as sell pile. Now I could probably do an entire episode on this because I was able to sell a lot of stuff on Facebook marketplace before our last move. I became an expert at selling things on Facebook marketplace and I made a lot of extra innings.

[00:18:34] Doing that, but just because you’re getting rid of it doesn’t mean it’s going into the trash. You could be recycling it, you could be donating it, you could be selling it. Um, but what we’re doing on the front end is making sure that we, what we’re keeping, what we’re getting rid of and what is. And so if you can go through one room a day and do this work, you’re going to get rid of a lot of things you no longer need that are no longer serving you that are no longer helping you become.

[00:19:09] Who you are becoming now, this is a great exercise to do whether you are moving or not, because if you’re staying where you are and you just want to keep a tidy home, the first thing you need to do is declutter, and then figure out where everything goes. But if you are a PCs and you’re going to declutter and then follow the rest of these steps to help you have a smooth.

[00:19:36] Now, what are those next steps? So that’s what we’re going to talk about in next week’s episode. We’re going to talk about what goes into preparing for a PCs, especially if it’s your first time to do an Oakland SPCs and overseas move, because you have a lot of things to think about. You have to divide everything in your home, into multiple shipments.

[00:19:58] Hey, is this going to go in my suitcase? Is this connected? With our household goods. Is this going to go into longterm storage? Is this going to go in our unaccompanied shipment? So I’m going to break all of that down for you, even if you are just PCs scene to another state, I’m going to give you some things that you can think through as well.

[00:20:19] Um, but I hope that this first step I think, applies to everybody. And if you are PCSing this summer, then get started on this step. Right. If you have some tips that you would love to share about your last PCS or how you are preparing for your move this summer, pop on into our Facebook group and share your favorite PCS tips and hacks with us.

[00:20:47] I know that we are better together and together we can impact the world for good. I hope you have an amazing week and until next time. Filled, fueled and full of joy.