Home décor can serve many purposes. Some people like to have décor that makes their home look like a staged show home, others have very personal sentimental décor. My husband and I fall into the latter group. Our ornaments and artwork definitely speaks to our travels and experiences together. (If you prefer video, scroll to the bottom of this post.)

Today, pick one room in your home and consider your décor pieces. You can pick any ONE room you like – living room, bedroom, dining room, entrance. Bring all of your décor – decorations on shelves, artwork, ornaments, keepsakes – and bring them all together to a flat surface – your dining table, perhaps the bed if you picked your bedroom.

Everything in your home speaks to you. When decorations speak to you they mostly scream “dust me!“ 😄 Seriously though, items either carry positive or negative messages. It’s important to remove negative messaging from your home. The negativity leaves along with the item.

Have your donate, give away, and keep piles ready, garbage as well, if you need.

Consider each piece of room décor individually. Our first two questions are always:

1. Do I love this?
2. Does this serve a purpose?

Decorations don’t tend to serve too much of a purpose, so the question “do I love this” will carry more weight today. And by love, I mean LOVE, not like, or I’ve had this for so long, or this was a gift…. Listen to the messages you tell yourself about each item. Only keep the ones you LOVE.

Additional questions to consider:

• Why do I have this piece?
• What messages does this piece say to me?
• Do I notice it or is it just a piece I walk past now?
• Does it still serve it’s intended purpose?

If you love the piece and it speaks positive messages to you, keep it! But if the piece is no longer serving you, or sends you negative messaging, it’s time to move it along, pass it along to someone who will love it, donate it.

My husband and I went through an exercise recently. For a quick overview, we asked two questions:

1. If the house was burning down, what would you grab? (Obviously, this is hypothetical for the purposes of this exercise, you wouldn’t safely grab anything if your home was actually on fire.)
2. If the house burned down, what would you spend money to replace?

Our outcome was amazing, and we removed more than 50% of our ornaments. I blogged about it here so you can get all the details of our exercise.

When you’re going through décor, be sure to take into consideration others in your home and if they would feel differently than you do about a piece. For items that are yours and yours alone, you are the decision maker, but for items that also involve other people, be sure to involve the all the decision makers in your exercise. When minimizing, you can do your things, you can do some general household things, but you can’t do the things that don’t belong to you or the things that affect others you live with. That’s just not respectful.

Home decorations can also include sentimental items, or items passed down to you from loved ones. It’s okay to let things go if you don’t love them and they are not serving a purpose. You don’t need to keep things because they were a gift or passed on to you. You get to make those decisions for yourself.

Taking pictures of items your parting ways with helps to keep the memory intact, while lightening the clutter in your home. You can make a memory book if you want (I recommend mixbook.com.) Perhaps some items can be repurposed to be more useful as opposed to just an ornament. A small vase could become a pen holder on a desk. Other small items could be placed inside fillable Christmas ornaments to be taken out and enjoyed during the holiday season, keep the memories intact.

If you need some help with this process, feel free to reach out to me, I’m happy to talk with you.

I welcome your ideas, thoughts, and questions in the comments below.

Remember you can share your journey with me and others by using hashtag #MarchMicroMinimizing, and tag me on Facebook or Instagram using handle @suzannegouldenILC.

Here’s me talking about room decor!

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