3 Easy New Year’s Resolutions for Your Home

While you make personal New Year’s resolutions, consider making some for your home as well. The reality is, many of us struggle with keeping resolutions. So we’ve chosen 3 resolutions that are attainable and easy to implement, so you can feel better in your home all year.

Clear out the clutter

One of the easiest and inexpensive ways to feel better in your home is to eliminate the clutter. Throughout the year, many of us accumulate new stuff without purging the old.

Easy resolution: Get out your calendar and assign a room in your house to each month of 2017. During that month, go through the items in each room. Don’t love it, use it, or wear it? Find a new home for it, perhaps a local charity!

Introduce the “10 minute tidy-up”

Living in a tidy home makes you feel energized and cuts down on the time it takes to do bigger clean-ups. But it’s easy to let the chaos of daily life get in the way of tidying up.

Easy resolution: Introduce your family to a new rule with no excuses: the 10 minute tidy-up. Before bed, spend 10 minutes going through the house and putting things where they belong. Put away clean dishes, put dirty dishes in the dishwasher, hang up clean clothes, throw dirty clothes in the laundry, and return loose items on counters and tables to their homes.

Shrink your carbon footprint (and your bills!)

There are many small, easy changes you can make in your home to reduce your family’s carbon footprint. Many of these things will also in turn reduce your utility bills. Win win!

Easy resolution: Each season, commit to making 1-2 small changes in your home. This winter, reprogram your thermostat or shift your daily routine based on time of use hydro rates. During spring gardening, include strategically planted trees as one of many ways to keep your home cooler without using the air conditioning. Learn how to run your air conditioning more efficiently all summer.