How To Begin The Process Of Decluttering
Does your home have too much stuff? If you want to understand and take action on how to start decluttering your home, then you are in the right place.
There are so many different ideas to declutter your home. Often these are confusing and the process involved. Please don’t panic, let me break it down into easy steps that you can follow to make your home easy to manage and clean.
I want to take you on a journey to discover how simple and easy it is to tackle the clutter in your home. The most difficult part often surprises people because of its emotional effect. It can wipe you out, and make you feel exhausted and drained.
What Is Clutter?
Clutter is something you don’t want or need in your home. It can be things you’ve used but last used a while ago. It can also be paper that has come into your home and just has yet to be dealt with when it’s no longer needed.
As time passes and we change, the things we need around us change too. When we have a young family the things we need change as the children grow and their needs change.
So clutter can look like:
- Things you don’t want
- Broken items
- Things you don’t like
- Items you no longer need
These can all be clutter. If you haven’t decluttered as you move through life you will have a lot of things that you no longer need in your home. Now is the perfect time to go through and sort out the clutter.
How To Declutter Your Home
The most important step is to have a plan for what you are going to do with the items you declutter from your home.
Create categories that you can assign each item of clutter to.
- Sell
- Trash
- Donate
You will need time for each of your decluttering sessions. Don’t pull everything out of a room with the hope of decluttering within a couple of hours. Go small, start with a shelf or a drawer, and set a timer for 10 – 15 minutes. You will be surprised how much you can get done in that time but do account for the memories that each item will bring up.
Enlist family members to help with decluttering, especially if it’s their things. They should be the ones spending the time decluttering the things they own.
What Is The First Thing To Do When Decluttering?
Living In A Clutter Free Home
Clutter free is a choice, it’s about making those choices every day! You have to make the time to look at your home and ensure that you are not letting clutter build!
Living in a clutter free home means that you spend less time maintaining it because cleaning will be easier with fewer items to clean!
Clutter will try and sneak in, it will try to hide in plain sight, so you will need time in your week to tackle the clutter!
Have rules for when you buy new items that you have to remove something that you already own!
It’s a really effective way of checking what you are buying with what you already have in your home!
Simple Tips To Start Decluttering Your Home
There are so many people focused on decluttering and often it assumes that you know what to do!
However, when it comes to clutter it’s about your own perception of clutter and what you want in your home that matters!
Yes, you will need to create piles of items as you sort through them, this helps to put things into categories but moving forward from this is often the most difficult!
You have to assign homes for the items you are keeping, without a home, a place to call their own, they will quickly become out of place and even start to cause problems, making an area look cluttered when in truth it just needs tidying up!
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How To Declutter Your Home
The simplest way to start organizing your home is to pick just one area and start there!
Don’t take everything out, unless you are trying to do a Marie Kondo style decluttering.
This is where you gather every item in a category and go through every single thing in one sitting!
I think this is so overwhelming that I don’t recommend it! I prefer a smaller approach, it might take longer, but it is more easily broken down into more manageable chunks of time!
I tend to say 15 to 20 minutes is a good time frame for decluttering if you have never done this before!
It’s surprising how emotionally draining it can be decluttering! You are going through every single item that you own, and you have to make a decision about what you intend to do with it!
But, part of the process of decluttering is getting those items out of the house as quickly as possible, so if you are intending to sell items get them listed and sold!
If you are taking things to the charity shop, get them there as soon as you possibly can!
When you are considering tossing an item, ensure that if you can recycle it you take the steps to get it out of your home, don’t let it sit there adding to the clutter in your home!
The Emotional Side Of Decluttering
What you don’t need is a lot of distraction, it’s going to be an emotional time and doing this whilst doing other things is not an ideal approach!
You have to make choices on what to get rid of and this is a difficult process to do whilst trying to do other things too!
Thinking about what you need to declutter is really just time, you can have the bins to sort items into that are labeled.
But in reality, you don’t need anything to get started!
What you will find is the need for finding the appropriate home for when you have finished the decluttering process!
This doesn’t mean that you need to rush out and buy more storage, what it means is taking the time to find storage with what you have got already!
Organizing your items doesn’t mean adding to them by buying more storage that will just add to the problem!
Ideas To Make Your Declutter Sessions Count
Decluttering is a process that once you start, you will have to schedule time regularly to keep on top of any clutter that comes into your home!
It’s not a once and done process!
Some simple tips and ideas to help you declutter and stay on top of the clutter coming into your home!
- Try to make quick decisions on items
- Have plans for what you are doing with the items you are getting rid of before you start
- Make your home a place to live and not a storage spot
- Have rules in place for when you buy new items, like one in one out
- Make your house feel like a home, a place where you feel comfortable to live
Let’s Recap…
When you are thinking about decluttering your home have a plan in place with the items that you want to get rid of!
If you intend to sell items, don’t let them sit there for months on end, get them listed and get them sold!
If you have items to take to the charity shop get them out of your home as soon as possible, you don’t want to start second-guessing your decision!
Take your time, this process isn’t quick, and you need to deal with the emotional stress that it can uncover!
Give yourself grace, it will stir up emotions and you don’t want to have a mess that you just can’t deal with!
This is from getting too much out and hoping that it’s going to be a quick process!
Yes, things will look disorganized when you start but remember it will be better when it’s finished!
That’s a good idea to get rid of things when you buy new ones. I feel like that would be a good way to reduce clutter. I’ll have to start doing that if I decide to get someone to help me declutter my house.