Table Of Contents
What Is Decluttering?
Decluttering involves deciding which items in your house are still needed and which are not. The process enables you to comprehend why you have clutter in your home and thus what to do with it. Everyone experiences cluttering in their home at some point. Cluttering in a home begins slowly and then multiplies.
It may start with a single piece of cloth thrown in the wrong place, a receipt left on top of the coffee table, and then the items accumulate as we buy more and bring them into the house. The accumulated stuff includes our actual belongings and mostly trash. The removal of this trash is the first step to decluttering a cluttered home.
No one wants to be the owner of an unattractive and dirty home. This is why most people have developed the culture of decluttering their homes more frequently. Why? What are the benefits of decluttering your home? In this article, we endeavour to share some of the essential creative tips for decluttering your home.
We also provide a declutter your home checklist with the major areas in your home that you could declutter and how to declutter them. However, before we get into that, let’s see some of the benefits of decluttering your home.
Advantages Of Decluttering
You stand to gain several benefits with fewer possessions. Some of these benefits include:
Less Cleaning
Cleaning is a daily requirement in every household. It is essential to clean valuable possessions even if it is tiresome to do so. However, having to clean items that you no longer need becomes even more frustrating. Wouldn’t you want to save yourself all that time and stress? Even looking around at a messy house full of clutter is a lot of stress on its own.
Everyone desires to live in a place that is pleasing to see every time. Wouldn’t it be great for you to look around your home and be satisfied with what you see? If it would, then you should consider decluttering your home ASAP!
Minimal Organisation
Do you ever struggle with having to organise everything just to find a single item in your house? With a house full of clutter, things suddenly disappear every time you need them. However, once you have your place decluttered, it becomes effortless to locate the items you need. With decluttering, you can rest assured of enough free space for you to move around your house and not have to struggle to find your items.
Reduced Spending
The process of decluttering primarily aims at ensuring you own few possessions, only what you need. If you take it seriously, you will spend less money doing shopping, so fewer things will be added to what you already have. This way, your house will not have to be filled with expensive, unnecessary stuff.
Do you know what this means? It means that you will save up a lot more money that will help you if you have an emergency. Similarly, your credit card statements will read low amounts, and you won’t have to get unnecessary loans from people.
Enhanced Focus
Once you have a clean decluttered home, you can rest assured of fewer worries. With your mind free from stress, you can shift your focus to other important things such as doing what you love, your career, spending more time with your family, etc. This is why decluttering a home is vital to anyone's life.
Tips For Decluttering Your Home
Create a Comprehensive Decluttering Checklist
The process of decluttering your home all goes back to how well you can program yourself. How best can you program yourself to have a plan? The best strategy for decluttering your home is to have a decluttering home checklist. The declutter checklist enables you to know where to declutter and what to declutter.
It is best to have a physical decluttering checklist; therefore, it would help if you had a printable declutter checklist. A printable decluttering checklist can help increase the success of your decluttering efforts.
Have a Deadline for Decluttering Your Home
The best way to go through home decluttering is to set a deadline and stick to it. Be self-obedient and responsible enough not to go past your deadline. Do not procrastinate. You can even set reminders on your calendar or have the deadline written on some sticky notes so that you see it as often as possible.
Remember, you do not have to create a specific day for decluttering your home. You can schedule as little as ten minutes a day if you are new to the process.
Difficult Start, Smooth Finish
For the best results, start by making your house a complete mess. That sounds even more frustrating, but do not fret. First, remove all your clothes and other items and lay them all on the floor. This activity allows you to have a quick check on every item you possess. It also enables you to identify extra items and those that you do not need.
Once you have all the items on the floor, start categorising them correctly into clothes, footwear, accessories, etc. After that, sort through every category, arranging and keeping the needed items in the right places while disposing of any clutter. This process is very intense and tiresome; however, you will be impressed by the results in the end.
Apply the Trash Bag Rule
Have you heard of the trash bag rule? Here, we use the word trash almost metaphorically to mean all items, not your actual possessions. This is an essential part of decluttering your home. In your house, you probably have old and non-operational electric appliances, old magazines and newspapers, old unused boxes and cords, etc.
While you might have spent some cash purchasing these items, their current conditions should relieve you of any emotional attachment to them. The aim here is to collect these in some trash bags and subsequently get rid of the trash bags. It is easier and less painful to part with the trash while decluttering your home than letting go of things like your essential clothes. For the best results, ensure that you fill at least one trash bag every day.
Let Go of What You Do Not Need
This is the part where most people feel a lot of pain and even start having second thoughts. However, if you have decided to begin thoroughly decluttering your home, be more firm with the decision that you have made. Sort through your items and identify what you need and what you don’t.
After identifying the things you need, consider donating all the rest that you do not need. It would help to give away at least one item a day, for starters. Then, you can increase to two or three each day. As you purchase new items, get rid of the ones that you no longer require. You do not necessarily have to throw everything away, but whatever is not necessary for you now might be essential to someone else.
Keep the feelings associated with the gift and not the gift itself. Presents from friends and family bring a lot of joy to us, and we develop very strong emotional attachments to them. However, it may reach a point where the object presented to you as a gift has lost its purpose. It would be better to keep the feeling it brings you but get rid of the actual object in such cases.
Break Down Your Home into Sections and Work With a Timer
Decluttering your home is not an easy process. It needs a lot of concentration, but you have to do it quickly, or else you may end up spending several more days on the task than necessary. Therefore, as you plan on decluttering your home, break it down into various sections.
Set a specific time for every section and get right into it. Once again, try and be more self-obedient and work within your allocated time. The more time you take to declutter your home, the more pain you feel having to let go of some of your belongings. Who knows? Maybe you might just change your mind and give up the whole process, allowing your home to go back to the mess it was.
Take the 12-12-12 Challenge
This is the ultimate hack in decluttering your home. It is more of a game and will bring you some fun, making decluttering less painful and tedious. The game is simple; once you have divided your home into various sections, begin with one area at a time. As you declutter every section, identify 12 items to keep, 12 items to donate, and 12 items to throw away in the trash. You can repeat this process about two to three times before moving to the next section.
Get Rid of Doubles and Triples
Over time, we human beings tend to buy what we already have. Maybe you have seen a new model, or you now love a different colour of an item, so you go on and buy it. This leads to the accumulation of similar items in your home. The secret when decluttering your home is to do away with similar objects. There is no need to keep three similar pans when you only need one. Why not give the extra to someone who does not have any?
Set a Target of Your Earnings After Decluttering
Yes, set a goal on how much you should get after decluttering your home. Since the process of decluttering a home is accompanied by some loss and pain, look at it as a way to make extra earnings too. While you can donate some of your items for free, you can also sell some of them and get some money in the process.
Inspect Your Home and Review Your Work
Generally, this is the final step in decluttering your home. It does not matter at what time you decide to declutter your house; it is always right to check and ensure that the process has been successful. So, how can you inspect your home after decluttering it? The first approach is by taking photographs before and after decluttering your home. With the two photographs, you can easily make comparisons, identify areas that need repetitions, and so on.
Secondly, you can call a friend to help you with the inspection. You can have a friend go through your house before you start decluttering the place and help you choose what items to do away with. Similarly, a friend could be helpful after you are done decluttering your home. They will help identify what you left that you should have removed, rearrange the house, and so on.
How To Declutter Your Living Room
This is where your family spends most of their time, and it is also where you can host your visitors. Therefore, it needs to stay clean and free from any clutter. For starters, arrange and properly stack your books or magazines on the coffee table. Consider keeping only the ones that either you or your family members would likely read.
Similarly, collect any items that remain idle in the living room. You could pack them in baskets or put them in a trash bag if they are not necessary anymore. Finally, you need to get rid of dust. You can quickly and easily wipe off the dust from surfaces in your living room. If you would love to go extra, you can even decide to vacuum the whole place to make it sparkling clean.
How To Declutter Your Bathroom
Bathrooms are essential in our daily lives, and so is their sanitation. Fold the towels in your bathroom, apply some glass cleaner on your mirrors and arrange the bath mat if you have one in your bathroom. Similarly, try to put all moisturisers, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, colognes, toiletries, and skin and hair care products back in their correct places.
Arrange your cabinets and drawers while ensuring that you put empty containers in trash bags. It could also help to have a magnetic strip inside the drawers or cabinets to help keep bobby pins in check. Lastly, get a hamper in your bathroom to facilitate the proper handling of dirty clothes and towels.
How To Declutter Your Kitchen
Decluttering the kitchen is a more intense activity. You will need to have enough time and dedication to give your kitchen a pleasant look. Here are some general tips for decluttering your kitchen:
• Some people prefer to use the top of the refrigerator to store some items. However, the top of the refrigerator is an obvious place of interest for any visitor who comes into the kitchen. Therefore, it would help if you relocated all the items on top of your refrigerator elsewhere. Again, if you no longer need some of those items, simply dispose of them.
• The inside of the fridge and cabinets need decluttering as well. Keep track of all the expiry dates of the contents in your fridge or cabinets. If you find expired products, remove them to save space. It would help if you kept a magnetised fridge file organiser. Sometimes too many papers and bills could fill your fridge, making it look unpleasant. However, with a maximum of three magnets on the fridge, you are good to go. Limit the papers inside your fridge at all costs!
• Many papers tend to pile up in the kitchen, such as receipts, bills, mails, newspapers, etc. It is best to stack all these in one corner properly and regularly sort them to identify the ones you no longer need. Once you identify them, you need to do away with them. At the same time, you can install hooks inside the cabinets to hang spoons, cups, pans, etc.
• It is best to organise your kitchen drawers to be as simple as possible. You can categorise them or even use labels if necessary. This facilitates uniformity, and you won’t have to keep rearranging your items in the drawers.
• Another important part of decluttering in your kitchen is the cleaning section. You know that cleaning products can take up a lot of space in the kitchen. Therefore, ensure you dispose of all the old unused cleaning products in your kitchen. Similarly, it is best to collect and keep all the new cleaning products inside one basket. This will save you the struggles of locating a single cleaning product and going through everything in the kitchen just to find it.
• Arm yourself with some twist ties to help you organise rubber bands.
• Finally, get a recycled cleaning wipe container to help you store plastic bags.
How To Declutter Your Bedroom
You can keep dirty laundry in check by having a laundry hamper inside your bedroom. It would also help to have a small piggy bank to keep the pocket change. You could also get a small waste bin for old receipts and unused papers.
Finally, learn how to utilise the space under your bed! You could just have storage containers under the bed to keep old clothes, extra curtains, linens, shoes, etc.
How To Declutter Your Closet
Separate the clothes you have worn for quite some time from those you have not. This will help you identify which clothes to donate and which ones to keep. Similarly, you can categorise your closet by having a clothing section and a shoe section. If you have many items, you could have some large baskets to facilitate their storage.
How To Declutter Your Home Office
First, clean your drawers and rearrange all the necessary items in them. Group your drawers according to the items you store in them. This way, you do not have to go through every drawer when looking for a single item. Properly stack and straighten your books. Also, get zip ties or twisty ties to organise all loose cords.
Practice self-obedience and responsibility by resisting the temptation to toss items all over the drawers and cabinets.
Decluttering Your Home Made Easy
It doesn’t matter what decluttering tip you choose to use to declutter your home or the day that you settle to do it. Once you have decided to free your home from clutter, that is the most significant step towards decluttering your whole life. Behind the accumulated clutter in your home lies a fantastic beauty that can’t be seen yet.
It is up to you to remove the clutter and give your house the sparkling look it deserves. Moreover, there are local professional cleaners available to assist you should you be unable to handle the job yourself. While you stand to lose some of your actual belongings, do not forget about the advantages that come with it. Imagine making some little cash from what you no longer need; isn’t that amazing? Do not waste any more time. Get it done!
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