From the drawer you can’t close to a garage where there’s no room for the car, clutter is spreading like a fungus around your home. Whether it is just you or the family, every month sees additions reducing the free space and making the task of disposing of clutter seem all the more impossible.
These tips will help make decluttering easier and get you sorting with purpose as the battle to reclaim control of your home begins in earnest.
1 Declutter With Purpose
Getting rid of stuff alone is a drag and a pain, so give your mission a purpose with a great reward on the horizon. That goal can be both rewarding and valuable, depending on how bad your clutter problem is.
- Fund a holiday or luxury purpose: One of the most rewarding ways to declutter is to put a shiny dangling golden carrot at the end of the process. By selling your unwanted stuff, you might be able to go on a city mini break or a golden sands holiday, all thanks to some tidying up.
- Support a charity: Most of us have a charity or two we support, and you can give back to the community, from pets to illnesses, by donating your unwanted stuff, from furniture to shelves of media and cupboards of clothes to a good cause.
- Create a home office or dream space: If there’s clutter everywhere, you can get rid of it and improve your home by turning the reclaimed space into a calming bubble away from the world, a smart office where the family can work or study away from the rest of the crowd.
2 How to Declutter Successfully
Having created a solid reason for your decluttering marathon, now concentrate on how you plan to go about this Herculean task, with minimalist principles a great way to plan ahead.
- Big boxes or bags on standby: Decluttering anything requires a destination for the stuff. Big boxes for recycling, bags for rubbish and a new home for things you want to keep will provide proof that the mountain is breaking down. Keep disposing of those bags of stuff, so you don’t just end up moving it elsewhere.
- Be brutal and decisive: Uncertain decluttering is not a recipe for success. Which is why the goal set in Tip 1 is so useful. Even once beloved items can be viewed in a different light if there’s a fun treat at the end of the exercise.
- Take a methodical approach: When clearing out drawers or cupboards, go one-by-one until each zone is clear. For smaller items in crammed drawers, use tins and boxes to categorise them and put things you want to keep boxed up for a simpler, clutter-free future.
- For the things you can’t throw. Don’t just push them to the back of the cupboard under the stairs or start breaking apart large items. Consider moving them to self-storage units so you have plenty of space at home, and your beloved possessions are safely tucked away in environmentally protected storage.
3 The Curse of the Cluttered Garage
So much stuff from previous declutterings can end up in your garage or shed. When decluttering these (common when an electric car turns up and needs a charging station) professionals can help. Local bike shops are happy to take previous generations of cycles away, furniture disposal companies can take big times away in a van, and almost everything else can be escorted in bulk to the recycling centre or dump.
4 Keeping Decluttered All Year Round
Over time, you might notice that your decluttering efforts seem to have created more space that is now filled with fresh stuff. Create seasonal reasons to clamp down on clutter with a good spring clean, Summer wardrobe refresh, winter digging-out-the-coats and so on. Use these and other reasons to keep digging and find what else you can dispose of or move on to a new home.
Finally, if you have the space and a hectic family life, put bins for unwanted clothes, larger folded-up boxes, batteries and other clutter-bugs that regularly mount up, making decluttering a proactive family effort that they can help with all year round to limit re-cluttering.
