10 Essential Tips to Help You Declutter Your Home
Are you feeling down? You shouldn’t be. 78% of homeowners believe that their well-being is linked to the tidiness of their homes.
If you want to pick your mood up, you should declutter your home from top to bottom. Yet the process of decluttering isn’t easy. Before you get underway, you need to know how to declutter your home from start to finish.
Where should you start the decluttering process? What should you get rid of? How can you prevent yourself from falling back into old habits?
Answer these questions and you can keep your home neat and tidy for years to come. Here are ten tips you should follow.
1. Imagine Your Home as a Visitor
A way to start decluttering is to imagine what a first-time visitor to your home would see. Think about the impression you leave with them with your items out as they are currently. Then think about specific steps you can take to impress your visitor.
Go through each room in your house and take notes on what you see. You can also take photographs, which you can use to create a before-and-after timeline.
2. Create a Checklist
Use your notes to create a declutter your home checklist. Put the most important locations of your house toward the top. Your kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and bathroom deserve special focus.
Your checklist should be more than a list of items you want to get rid of. It should give you tasks to make your house easier to navigate and more comfortable to live in. You may need to vacuum each room or fill in holes where pests can crawl in.
3. Start With Short Sessions
Decluttering can be difficult, even if your checklist is short. Start with 15-minute sessions so you can build momentum to complete your checklist. Check off each item to give yourself a visual reminder of what you’re doing.
4. Sort Your Belongings Into Three Categories
You should start looking through your belongings as soon as possible. You should create four separate categories of items. One category is trash, which you can remove from your house immediately.
The giveaway category is for items you can give to friends, relatives, or thrift stores. Items should be intact or easy to repair. Any duplicate items should be given away to other people.
The keep category is for items you want to keep. Essential clothes, appliances, and items you’ve used multiple times in the past year belong in this category.
5. Give Away One Item Every Day
The average room has roughly 2,000 items you can see, which can be visually stressful. Focus on giving one item away every day. Once you’ve built momentum, try giving two or more items away every day.
6. Get Rid of Clothes You Never Wear
It may be hard for you to tell what clothes are essential or not. Hang up each article of clothing with a coat hanger facing to the right. After you wear the clothes and launder them, you should hang them back up facing to the left.
After a month, you should give away any clothes that are still facing right. It is okay to keep some seasonal clothes, but you should evaluate if you are actually going to wear them or not. If you have too many clothes to get rid of, you can order a trash disposal company.
7. Put Your Items Back Where They Belong
Whatever items you keep, you need to make sure they go to the right locations. If you take a book off your shelf, you should put the book back on the shelf. The fewer items you have on the floor or stacked on top of other things, the cleaner your house will look.
If you have trouble remembering where things are, you can put labels on your items that correspond to different locations. You can also take photographs of where things belong.
8. Use Furniture Storage
If you have a desk with drawers, you can put items in them to free up space on your floor. You can also put storage containers underneath your bed or on empty shelves in your bookcase. Make sure you label what is inside the containers so you can remove anything you don’t need anymore.
You can rent a storage space if you don’t have enough room in your house. But you shouldn’t throw everything you own into the space. Put bulky items into it that you can’t fit somewhere in your house and don’t want to give away.
9. Digitize Your Papers
You rarely if ever need to keep physical papers. You can make scans of the papers and download them onto your computer or a hard drive.
You can make copies of your photos or papers in case your computer or hard drive crashes. Upload one copy of each document to a cloud drive, though you should label each file so you know what it contains.
10. Avoid Buying New Things
You can undo your decluttering by buying too many new things. Whenever possible, rent things you want to buy and give them back to their owners.
When you go to the store, bring only as much money as you need to make your purchases. Pay in cash, which helps you track your expenses easily.
Figure Out How to Declutter Your Home
You can declutter your home starting today. Go through each room and figure out what needs to go. Make a checklist and start with 15-minute cleaning sessions.
Try to give away at least one item every day until you have cleared your home out. Focus on items you don’t use, like clothes.
Make the most out of your storage options so your floors stay clean. You should limit how much you spend on new items and try to borrow things instead.
You’re not alone in cleaning your home. Man with a Van Dublin serves Dublin-area homeowners. Contact us today.