Life accumulates. This is just a simple truth of time passing.
That means the more time you spend in a home, the more items and belongings are likely to pile up. Soon, you might feel as if you’re in a prison of you’re own making.
A messy, cluttered home isn’t only irritating and cumbersome, it can literally become bad for your health. This is why the act of decluttering your home can be absolutely essential.
If you’ve never taken the time to really dig through your home in this way before, it might be time to start considering it seriously.
What are some tips that can help you to get through a decluttering job in no time? Read on and we’ll walk you through what you need to know.
1. Make a Plan
It’s easy to look at the massive amount of items in your home and get overwhelmed. Where can you start and how long will it take to get this whole thing sorted out? It can be so nerve-wracking that it could even prevent you from starting.
In order to get around this feeling, it’s best to start by making a plan. Having a plan of approach will help you to quell those feelings of guilt and stress and get down to business.
Having an organized approach will also help to ensure that your decluttering operation will feel manageable. What form of organization will make sense for you will differ depending on your own personality.
However, a helpful approach can be to break down your overall mission into smaller categories. You could think about clothes, kids’ toys, knick-knacks, books, and so forth all as different mini-tasks.
Alternatively, you could break down your mission into rooms. Maybe you’ll want to do the kitchen one day, the living room another, the garage a time after that.
However, you can try to break down your overall task into smaller ones. This will help you get through them and have a feeling of accomplishment that can help push you onward.
2. Be Ruthless
As you move through your home’s various items, you’re going to be tempted to keep many objects. Unless you want to end up back where you’ve started, you need to have a ruthless attitude and throw away whatever you don’t absolutely love.
There’s no room in the average household for items that you’ll maybe like to have on some imaginary day far in the future. If the item you’ve picked up doesn’t have any value to you right now, it’ll likely be better off in someone else’s possession.
There are a few exceptions to this rule, such as if an item has a strong sentimental value to you. However, you should attempt to keep only a box or so worth of items that have strong sentimental value but no real purpose in your home.
If you need, you can then keep this box in storage somewhere if it is taking up too much room in your house, where you can always have access to the items when you want to see them.
Resist the urge to make a maybe pile when going through items. Consider each item and make a strong yes or no decision to keep it.
3. Use the 4-Box Method
Some people get overwhelmed when sorting the items that they decide to get rid of.
Others feel guilty about throwing things away. Just deciding what to do with the items that you know that you don’t want can feel overwhelming on top of the process of deep cleaning your home!
You can use what is known as the 4-box method to get around this issue.
Take four cardboard boxes and label each one boldly with a sharpie. Label them as trash, donate, keep, and relocate. Bring these boxes into every room with you when you go to declutter.
Every item you pick up must go into one of these boxes, even if it is an unimportant item. Don’t skip it. If you can, it can be beneficial to take apart each and every room in this way.
In the end, you’ll have only what’s left in the keep box to redecorate the room with. Starting over fresh in this way can help your brain let go of your attachment to the other items.
Sometimes, it takes the physical process of actually removing items to get your brain to let go and allow the room to be born anew. The relocated items you can move to storage space and then place once you’ve done this process in every room of your home.
4. Create New Storage Solutions
If your counters and cabinets seem to be overflowing with items, it might be helpful to embrace some new storage ideas for your home.
What exactly this will be for your home will depend on you and where you need help the most. It will also depend on your budget and the space you have at your disposal.
Expanding the cabinet space in your kitchen might be a novel idea, or you might want to create lofted storage space in your garage to make extra room for boxes and containers.
Whatever you do, bringing in new storage solutions to your home can help to avoid further clutter in the future.
Use These Tips for Decluttering Your Home
If you’re up to your neck in objects and items, it might be time to seriously consider a real deep clean for your abode. The above tips for decluttering your home can help you to get through the process in one piece.
Need more advice and inspiration for the home? Keep scrolling our blog for more.
