Review of : 5 Days to a Clutter-Free House by Sandra Felton and Marsha Sims

This book was written to help you declutter your home in five days. The book outlines stages to achieve your ultimate goal as well as the methods to go about organizing while you are decluttering it. Utilizing teams and an organizing method utilizing boxes to neutralize the items to the correct room, they also give examples of each situation that developed. They go into detail about how to get rid of those boxes once you created them.  Lastly, the book tells how to “manage” yourself. This is the best part of the book.  It tells you how to maintain your decluttered house, with some very good tips and advice.

Upon opening up this book, I was amazed. These ladies hit the nail on the head when it came to “disorganized” people. See, I had an ulterior motive for requesting to review this book. Maybe there was something out there that could help my time lacking self to get more organized. I am all of the things they listed…intelligent, curious, productive, frugal, helpful, creative, careful and loving. I often call myself soft…and unorganized. But, don’t disturb my unorganized system…I know where my stuff is located. So, I continued on reading. My house is not messy. My desk is disorganized but not my house.

I reach the point where the ladies state “get a team together”…well, that’s not going to help me. None of my friends want to help – they are all afraid they are going to throw the wrong thing away, even if they don’t throw anything away. My family isn’t good at helping, except to pile things higher, even if I give them direct orders of what to separate into what…it just isn’t happening. The “About this Book” section in Chapter one is, in my opinion, the greatest. Don’t get me wrong, now. I LOVE the book. It’s a direct approach to becoming clutter free. However, there is a quote I love in this section: “Our purpose in writing this book is to help you move to a new way of life from the clutter that surrounds you.” Makes me want to read this book many times to just keep in mind what I’m reading!

Twenty two pages into the book I come across the title of a section called “It’s hard to change”. Boy do they have my family pegged! Then, the next section “Fall in love with an Organized Life” got me to dreaming. I only wish! I always tell myself, until my kids leave home – I’ll never be organized. Can I really do it with the help of a book and no “team”?

I like the fact that the authors give examples of what the intent is in each chapter - real life true stories. And, what’s best is they give examples of how each team member is to tackle their designated area.  I can see where that would help eliminate problems, especially when you are the one to ultimately say it goes in the trash or not. By utilizing team members and organizing boxes they ultimately have a unique system to separating items by room it belongs in and by the items themselves.

While I like this system and think it would work well, I don’t think it’s for me. I have a lot of extenuating circumstances to my home, one being the fact that we live in a very rural area and not many of my friends can take five days to help me clean my house.

As for the book, itself, I think the authors did a very good job on explaining why it’s done the way they do it, why they call it what they do, how to do it and the methodology behind it. Kudos on a well written book!  I think that the book could be bettered by problem solving the area that someone may not have a “team” to come in and help them, nor may they have the money to hire someone to come help them.  Also, figure out about those boxes that end up lying around. Yes, your house is now clutter- free, but it’s not box free.  So, while you may not have clutter laying around you now have boxes laying around that eventually have to find their rightful places  at some point in time. So, while you did declutter your home from clutter, you now have to declutter it from boxes. In essence I love the way the book is written. It is lighthearted, easy to read and well worded. Someone who has room for the boxes and has a team of people who can help them, can declutter their home quickly.  

I am giving this book four stars. Why, after the review I’ve given it? Because overall this book is well written and a great book; it is just not the book for me and decluttering my house. I’m not giving it five stars because I think somewhere in there, there could have been some type of solution for people who don’t have a team of people and can’t hire a team of people. I also think there could be a solution for those who don’t have “storage” for all those boxes they create in order to declutter their homes. Yes, those boxes are going to be disappearing soon, but in the meantime there just might not be storage space. The end of the book is my favorite part. It is strategically written with some very good tips and advice on maintaining your clean and decluttered house. While they can’t “make” you keep it clean and keep it from being decluttered, they sure told you how to do go about it.

Thanks for a great read and kudos on a job well done!

I received this book (5 Days to a Clutter-Free House by Sandra Felton and Marsha Sims) from bookfun.org for my honest opinion and review.