Decluttering is the ideal way to make your home cleaner, more easy to manage and to unburden yourself from a large amount of items you don’t want or need. It can help you to free up storage space in your home, help your home to feel bigger, and it can also be a great option if you’re planning to move home so that you don’t need to pack and take any unwanted items.
It can also help achieve a safer home. If your home is full to the brim with trip hazards and items in the way, it could cause trips and falls, so decluttering – for older or vulnerable people especially – is a must.
How to Declutter Your Home Effectively
Start Small
Thinking about decluttering your entire home is going to feel like a monumental task, and make it more likely that it’ll be one you’ll put off. However, you don’t need to think about trying to declutter your entire property in one day.
Start by doing bits at a time to make it more manageable, such as a room a day, or even just a corner of the house at a time. Work your way around in your own time and don’t feel pressured or rushed, or it runs the risk of giving up.
Donate Unwanted Items to Charity
A good incentive for decluttering is to think of the ways you can benefit others, too. If you have piles of items like unwanted clothes and ornaments, you can donate these to a charity service to help raise funds, while making your home cleaner and brighter at the same time — so it’s a win-win.
Using charity as a reason will help you to feel more motivated about sorting your items, and you might also want to donate a little extra while you’re there!
Sort into Piles
This is one of the most effective ways to stay productive and organized when you’re decluttering. A good place to start is by having a ‘to keep’ pile and a ‘get rid of’ pile. You might not know what you want to do with certain items yet, but it’s enough to know that you no longer want to keep them. You might even want an ‘unsure’ pile.
Once you know exactly what you’re keeping, you can then return to the other piles later and plan what to do with them, such as selling or donating.
Leave Sentimentality Out of It
Most people would admit that they have a pile of clutter gathering dust in their home because it’s full of sentimental items. Even if you don’t use the items or have barely looked at them for years, you might be keeping them out of a sense of guilt or obligation, such as if the item was a past gift or if it reminds you of someone.
While it’s always okay to keep something sentimental you absolutely don’t want to get rid of, try to be more objective about items you simply don’t want or need.
