5 Tips for Making a Fresh Start with a Partner

This month we're focusing on giving your home a fresh start for the new year. When you live alone, it can be really easy to go through your home and decide what to keep and what to purge. When living with a partner, however, it can be so much more complicated. After the jump, check out a few tips for making a fresh start with two opinions.

1. Set aside time when you can work on the project together. Even if you only have a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, get together with your partner to at least start working on the project. Once you've got the project going and you've set some parameters for what you will keep and what you will purge, you can work on it individually.
2. If you don't work well together, break up your home into zones and go your separate ways. Send your other half out to the garage to organize stuff while you work in the attic.
3. Create separate piles to help whittle down your stuff. By creating three piles – trash, donate, and keep – you can make short work of going through a lot of stuff.
4. Be prepared to be the voice of reason. If your girlfriend refuses to get rid of her collection of stuffed animals, try to reason with her. If reason doesn't work, try the "I'll get rid of this thing you hate, if you'll do the same" approach.
5. On the other hand, be willing to give a little. You may not understand why your boyfriend is keeping that collection of concert t-shirts he outgrew sometime around middle age but it’s not worth an argument. Besides, I'm sure there are things he thinks you're unreasonable for keeping!

Image: Flickr member emilydickinsonridesabmx licensed for use by Creative Commons

Comments (7)

Amen to this. My husband and I just finished a closet clean-out and organization project and it was definitely a partnership.

I think if you don't do it together, it can cause friction that is unnecessary; on the other hand, trust is key in any relationship, so being able to trust your partner's decisions is also pretty important. It's a balance for sure.

I think partnership is great. My partner and I just tackled a giant junk closet together and I thought the pairing would be a disaster. But, it went very smoothly. We both can toss things quickly but it was helpful to make joint decisions.

I really don't know how we've been married 38 years, sigh. We have to separate on household organization. I guess that must be why we've stayed married 38 years, LOL!

We each take care of deciding about whatever we bring into the house. My stuff is my decision, his is his, and only the things we pick out together requires a joint decision. (I have the good fortune to have apartner with very similar taste -- so far nothing that drives me crazy has appeared.)

HOWEVER. I usually find decorative treasures at flea markets and the like, and then HE often falls in love with them. I CAN chuck them if I want, but if I suspect he likes them, I ask him first. (I have kept a few things I was bored with because he liked them. I liked them when I got them, I just grew tired. So not a big problem to keep them...)

After dealing with the death of a hoarder family member, I took care to go thru my things and pare them down pretty drastically. Unfortunately, my husband has our entire spare bedroom, the hall closet and a 2 car garage so full of crap that there is literally no storage space for normal household things like the vacuum cleaner. He refuses to get rid of anything, ever, even tho he can't get to half of the useful things because there's so much junk in front of them.
None of these suggestions work on someone with a possessions problem, one has to be ready to pare down and trying to make someone do it before they're ready is a recipe for disaster. or divorce.

I love organizing and keeping things orderly & tidy. My BF, on the other hand, keeps things like cardboard boxes & piles of clothes sitting in his room for weeks or months at a time. (We don't share an apartment).
He recently tore his ACL and can't get around too well, so I took advantage one Saturday morning and said "Babe- you just lay there in bed & tell me what I can do with all of this stuff". He resisted at first, but I sort of just started shuffling things around and he began to chime in.
I handed him piles of mail and asked him to sort through what he needed and used one of those boxes as a trash can. We went through the piles of clothes and decided on "donate, sell, save, pitch". I put his sports equipment away in his closet (since he won't be using them anytime soon).
In the end, I was able to drag 3 bags of "donate" out to my car, pitch a large box of trash, he had a nice clear space to move about on his crutches without fear of slipping, and I felt helpful and productive. WIN!
Of course this won't work for everyone, but I thought I'd share. ;)