Decluttering is an exhausting but necessary job. Whether you are moving to a smaller house or just tidying up your home, decluttering is not as simple as we would like. Today we will show you how to declutter your home.
The best way to declutter your home is to do it in stages. Start with one room, one living space, one place in a large room, etc. The point is to focus on a single place until its spic and span before moving on to another. Watching each space transform after decluttering will give you the oomph to keep going.
Also, you don’t need any tools for this work. With that idea, let’s take an in-depth look at how to declutter your home.
Preparation
Define your clutter! What do I mean? There is a lot of clutter collecting in your home, and there are different ways you would like to handle it. Select five different baskets that you will use to separate the clutter in different rooms. You can improvise with cartons, but easier everything you use should be well labeled to differentiate from each other. You can also use bins or baskets of different colors as long as you can differentiate between the purposes. Select baskets for the following purposes;
- Recycle- this is a bin for all the items that you want to reuse and recycle. These are items that can serve different purposes and get useful around the house.
- Put away- the basket is items that have a rightful position but have crept up in the wrong place. It can be a coffee mug that got stuck in your home office, a spoon that disappeared under the bed, or a sweater that has found a new place in the living room.
- Fix- these baskets are for items that are still useful but need a little fix or mend. It can be your favorite sweater that gets caught in the doorknob or a pair of sneakers that you have been too lazy to clean.
- Donate- this is a bin for items you no longer need, but you can imagine someone who would use them. You can donate them to an organization or home.
- Trash- pick a basket for items that are no longer used and don’t fit in all the other baskets. This is simply a basket for the must-go or trash in your home.
Ensure you bring these bins into every room and leave them in a central position as you work. The idea is to ensure you don’t need to go looking for them while you are decluttering. They should be within reach to make the work faster and simpler. Ready to declutter? Let’s get started with the main task at hand; decluttering!
- The bedrooms
You can start from any room but I prefer starting from the bedroom since it’s the cleanest and also the haven of the home.
Spread the bed! There is no progress in decluttering when you have some wrinkled bed sheets staring at you.
Just next to your bed is the nightstand. Remove anything unnecessary from the nightstand, including novels you have completed, chargers, pens, and glasses. Recycle or throw out those dried-out pens and tissue boxes.
Declutter your dresser. Anything that is properly in place should be left like that, but clothes that need folding or hanging go to the put-away basket. Separate the clothes you don’t wear to the trash or donate baskets. Anything damaged should go into the mend/fix basket.
Move to the work desk or vanity. Avoid putting items back into the drawers. Put them in the basket or the trash if you don’t need them again. These could be items like trashed papers, dried pens, and emails you have opened and responded to.
Return all the items to their rightful places. Everything in the put-away basket has its place in the house. Take the mugs to the kitchen, fold or hang the clothes and arrange the items in drawers as you sort them appropriately.
- Closet or clothing
Clothing is a whole other category, so I lie to separate it from the bedroom decluttering. I hope you are not panicking when you think of all the clothes you trashed on the chair to arrange for the weekend. Take a deep breath!
Start by sorting the clothes according to type, separate your dresses from your jeans, shoes, denim, tops, shirts, etc. Why do this? It’s easier deciding whether to donate a dress looking at all the dresses you own. It’s also easier to realize your heels need wiping since there is no clean pair left.
Once you have pulled out and sorted your clothes according to type;
- Take all the dirty laundry into the laundry basket and take it to the laundry room for immediate cleaning.
- Anything to be repaired goes to the fix basket and should be delivered to the tailor asap.
- Donation should be taken to the donation center or the consignment center.
Put anything in the wrong place to its proper place, like undies in the closet to the drawer. Remember that you need to be ruthless with the closet to succeed.
Don’t forget the shoes! Most people have too many pairs, some we buy out of peer pressure and impulse buying. Most of these shoes we hardly wear, even for special occasions. Get rid of the ones you don’t wear by trashing them or donating to charity organizations.
- The bathroom
Since your bathroom is right next to the bedroom(s), why not declutter next?
Start with the medicine cabinet. Take out all the outdated medicines, incomplete doses, skincare products you stopped using, and the makeup. You can keep everything back in to avoid contamination. Store the items you use most at eye level and within reach.
Move to the cabinets. Sort everything you need and don’t need out as quickly as possible. Put back everything you need and toss what you don’t need. Remember to keep what you often use within reach.
Declutter everything under your sink. Pull all those items out and sort them into the baskets you staged. Declutter your bathroom products. It’s easy to get trapped in the habit of keeping old or almost-empty shampoo bottles, shower gel, shaving cream, hair spray, etc. After buying new ones. It’s even worse if, like me, you are always thinking of how to recycle containers.
Once you have covered all the areas in your bathrooms, sort the items that did not find a home in the room. Trash what you don’t need and donate what can be donated.
- The kitchen
The kitchen is also challenging to declutter as it’s a hub of activities. Cooking, eating, and socializing, among other activities, see to it that many items find themselves in the kitchen. It can be next to impossible to successfully declutter the kitchen in one instance. You can choose to focus on one area at a time.
Start with the attic or higher cabinets. Remove everything and access what needs to stay or go. These are the powerhouse spaces in your house. Access and return everything in the right place while the other stuff goes in the put-away bin.
Move onto the lower cabinets and do the same-empty, access, and put back the stuff that belongs. Ensure you do the same for space under the sink. You will find everything under the sink.
Finish u with your counter space. Remove everything from the chopping boards, the cutlery, and the utensils. You should seek storage space or everything. The only things that should remain are those that you use every day.
Put everything in the put-away bin in the rightful space.
- The living room
The living room is the most challenging place to declutter because it gets a lot of traffic and has limited storage places. The key is to identify the permanent storage places and decide what goes there. Also, ensure you declutter often. Ensure all the books are on the bookshelves and the remotes in the tv console every night before you retire to bed.
Start with the books when decluttering. It can be the magazines and newspapers that are lying around. Keep everything in the right place. Empty your bookshelves and coffee tables and access each item. Put the books away and return the remotes to the right place.
You can call the companies sending unnecessary mail to stop them and ask other companies to send mail via electronic means. Fold the seat blankets neatly and put them in the proper place.
Electronics can also clutter the living room, especially with the cables and wires crisscrossing all over. Detach everything and unravel the cables. Remove anything that does not connect to the television or the home theatre. Store all the video games, CDs, and DVDs and donate those not being used. You can even sell them online. Store chargers and USB cables that are not in use.
Return everything in the put-away bin to the right place. It can be random t-shirts, mugs, and shoes. Return them to the right storage!