If there is one thing that stresses me out as a military spouse, it is clutter in my house.
If you’ve been married to someone in the military for more than a few years, you know the lingering doom of the inevitable. Another move. Another total uprooting and relocating of your family and belongings to a foreign place. If you’re like me, moving is an extremely stressful life event, which doesn’t really get any easier with practice, unfortunately. If I can offer one tip to simplify your life, especially around PCS season, it would be to start by simplifying your home.
In this piece, I will talk about the ways I like to always maintain a minimalistic home to make my house “moving ready” at any given moment. What is a minimalistic home exactly? I think this means something different to everyone. For me, a minimalist home doesn’t quite mean a house without junk. It means a house without any useless junk.
I met a lady who created the rule that during a PCS, she gave away, threw away or donated any items she did not use in her current house. She said, “Why should I bring an item to my new house that I did not ever use in my last house?” This made a lot of sense to me, and I have adopted this rule into my own home. So where do you start, you ask? It just really depends.
If you are preparing to move soon, you might want to complete an expedited version of the following steps I give below. If you just recently moved, you should wait at least a few months to begin the process. If you moved several months ago, now would be the perfect time to start.
After living in many houses over the past seven years of military life, I have found that it takes about six months of living in your home before you know where everything belongs in it. You only know so much when you unpack each of those boxes those first few days living in your new house. You can try and be as strategic as possible with your placement, but I promise you there will be things you decide to change later. The first six months, you will be focused on getting acclimated to a new location, making friends, getting established with doctors, dentists, schools, extracurricular activities. Once you feel yourself getting into a good rhythm in your home, you can begin focusing on fine-tuning everything to meet your specific needs in that season so that it all makes the most practical sense for your family.
So here are the steps below:
1. To begin, sit down and make a list of every room and closet in your house. Include your garage and car on this list because, while not inside your home, these are places that you utilize often and need to organize just as much as your indoor spaces. Number your list in order of which spaces you will organize first through last. Plan to tackle one space at a time, not moving to the next space until the current one is complete.
Note: You will need to divide some spaces up into multiple zones. For instance, the kitchen is the most daunting. Divide the kitchen into three spaces: fridge/freezer, pantry, and kitchen cabinets/drawers. Similarly, separate closets from rooms. For instance, make the master bedroom one day and the master bedroom closet a different day.
2. Create a designated space for all unwanted items: Make two piles: the throwaway pile and the giveaway pile (you may also need a pile for items to sell). I like to use our garage for this space, and then I save organizing the garage for last. This works well for me, because moving things from the house to the garage makes me feel like the items are “gone,” and then the piles of unwanted things collecting in the garage ultimately motivate me to tackle it once it gets to the point of overwhelming.
3. For each space, this will be the process you will go through:
a. Empty the space completely. Take every single item out of every drawer, shelf and cabinet. Use an all-purpose cleaner to wipe everything down.
b. Physically pick up each item that you removed and ask yourself if it makes sense to keep that item. If you haven’t used it in the last six months, the answer is most likely “No.”
c. Put unwanted items in a box and take it to the garage and sort them into throwaway or giveaway piles.
d. For whichever items are remaining that you do want to keep… ask yourself, where does it make the most sense to store this item? If you use it often, it should be in a highly accessible place. If you don’t use it regularly, it can be stored in the back of a cabinet or on top of a hard-to-reach shelf, and it will rarely inconvenience you. For this step, you are strategically finding a home for each item.
Once you’ve completed each of these steps in each space in your house, you should be feeling like your home is so much more manageable and purposeful, and you will thank yourself later for that when you’re packing up (and later unpacking) those boxes full of manageable items with purpose.
Blog Brigade unites military spouses by creating a community built on shared experiences and mutual support. Navigating the complexities of military life can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Military OneSource offers valuable resources focused on well-being, readiness, and connection. Explore a range of moving and housing resources tailored to your needs.
