1. Skip The Container Shop
After deciding to combat the mess in your home, the first thing that many clutter victims do is start shopping for boxes, bins, and other storage containers. Unfortunately, this can be a huge mistake. While it may seem as though you’re being productive, you only put your organisation undertaking off further. In fact, you actually make it more challenging by adding more belongings to the mix. For this reason, you should wait to invest in storage items until you need them later.
2. Live Within Your Means
Just like money should dictate how much you spend, the size of your home should decide how much stuff you own, not the other way around. If your closet is bursting with clothes, you can try getting rid of a few unwanted or unnecessary pieces, instead of buying a whole new closet to fit them. You should also be incredibly conscious of what you bring into your home. If you don’t need something or even really want it, then it shouldn’t even make it past your doorway.
3. Let Go Of Sentimentality
Sentimentality makes decluttering an incredibly difficult job. You know that you don’t need boxes full of tacky souvenirs, rubbish drawings, old birthday cards, and more, but nostalgia just won’t allow you to let them go. When you’re struggling to throw unnecessary belongings away, you need to remember that life is about people and experiences, not things. If you have amazing memories and photographs of a favourite vacation, then you don’t need an ugly tea towel too.
4. Maximise Your Storage Space
Once you’ve cleared out a lot of the junk from your house, you need to start organising what you have left. This means giving all of your things a specific place to live. However, this isn’t going to be easy if you lack in storage space. Thankfully, there are many ways to increase it in your home, from adding new cupboards as part of a kitchen renovation to putting up an extra shelf. Multi-purpose furniture is also ideal, as it offers storage without taking up any extra space.
5. Give Junk A Home
Even after a clear out, every home has little things, like tape, pens, and chargers, that get used a lot, but don’t really have a logical place to stay. Instead of wasting time trying to find a home for this junk, or, worse still, leaving it to pile up on your surfaces, you should create a junk drawer. This allows you to find these items easily, without having them mess up your home. Just make sure that, when this junk drawer starts to overflow, you clear out the unnecessary things again.
6. Stick To A Schedule
Certain areas in your home, like the living room and kitchen, often need cleaning on a daily basis, whereas others require much less upkeep. To keep clutter from building up anywhere in your house, you need to understand exactly how often each room needs to be cleaned and write a schedule to remind you of when this is. This should give details on the specific task that you need to do. As long as you stick by this schedule, your home should stay neat and tidy.
7. Work As A Team
Whether you live with your parents, roommates, or a partner and children, you have to work as a team to keep your home looking its best. If even one of you isn’t on board with the decluttering and organising plan, it could result in mess and chaos, ruining it for everyone else. To get everyone involved, you should give them each their own chores to complete on the schedule. When given the right task, even the youngest of children can lend a hand too.
No one enjoys being surrounded by clutter, so keep your home tidy by following the advice above.
