Clean up: Tips on taking care of clutter and dealing with dust and grime

If fall is the time to stock up and settle in, safely surrounded by all your favorite things, then spring must surely inspire the opposite emotion. Spring is the time to cleanse the corners and the closets. Spring is the time to unburden and bloom.

Or at least these were the thoughts on Sonja Carroll's mind a week or so ago, on one of the first warm days in the Salt Lake Valley. With a Granite Peaks Community Education catalog in hand, Carroll sat trying to decide between two different classes on home organization.

Organization does not come naturally to her, she says.

"My father was a knickknack person and I am, too," she says. "He used to go to Deseret Industries and buy knickknacks." Carroll admits she enjoys reading about reducing clutter more than she enjoys actually throwing stuff out. (Don Aslett's ""For Packrats Only"" is her favorite organizing book.)

Still, Carroll says she is making progress, taking a little something to heart from most everything she reads.

For Carroll, then, and for all of us who like lists and tips, here are thoughts on spring cleaning and organizing, culled from an overflowing file drawer of sources.

Begin with your brain

Author and owner of an organizing business, Laura Leist has a new book called "Eliminate Chaos" (Sasquatch Books, $19.95), which contains chapters on psychology. Have you ever wondered why you surround yourself with stuff? Or why you put off cleaning? (Are you a perfectionist? Easily bored?)

Some of Leist's suggestions for overcoming procrastination include: Schedule time on your calendar to get started on your cleaning and organizing. Break the tasks down into manageable pieces. Select your most important rooms and do them first. Reward yourself when you have finished a room. (Your reward could be a dinner out, a massage or a movie — or how about the services of a professional housecleaner to clean the rooms you didn't get to?)

Leist has had several clients who needed to go to a psychologist to fight depression before they could start cleaning out their clutter. For the less-than-clinically disorganized, however, she offers these tips:

1. Since you typically wear 20 percent of what you own 80 percent of the time, it doesn't make sense to hold on to clothes you haven't worn in a year. If you are dieting, allow yourself to save only one pair of pants you hope to wear again. When she helps her clients clean out their closets, Leist says people never call her later to say they miss something they've given away.