June, 2022
Owning fewer things can make living easier. Without clutter swamping you, you are more able to enjoy life with less stress.
The clutter can be a constant source of stress, making you ashamed, and reluctant to allow friends or guests to visit. At the extreme scale, these relationships can be impacted. The time saved on not cleaning becomes outweighed by the extra time spent looking for things.
When your home is free from clutter, it is easier to reduce dust and allergens, as it can be harmful to people with respiratory conditions. Keeping the house clean becomes less arduous when surfaces are empty and there is less on the floor to hover around.
Take the stress out of decluttering with these simple steps:
Find the right time to start. Our daily lives consume energy, do not overburden yourself. Start decluttering on a week when you don’t have other plans pr when you have booked some time off work.
It takes a lot of work to declutter an entire house. You can take it room by room, focusing on one task at a time. You can focus your efforts on completing each task within a room before moving on to the next.
Separate objects into different piles, things that you want to keep and things that you will no longer keep.
The keep pile can be split into things you regularly use and things you want to store.
The pile of things you no longer want can be split into the things that you will throw away, things you will recycle, things you will donate to a friend or a charity or the things you want to take to your local car boot sale.
For items that have been sitting on a shelf or in a cupboard for months without use, but you still feel an attachment to, it might be helpful to remember that a lot of times they can be replaced quickly and at low cost if you are ever to need them again in future. If you have items that you are storing and plan to use again someday, set a specific date for when you are going to use it, if this date comes and you have still not found a use for it, decide again if it is worth keeping. I usually say if something hasn’t been used within a year, throw it out!
A good way to see the true value of an item is to ask yourself whether you’d buy this item again if you saw it in a shop today.
In most cases, the things you own aren’t going to increase in value. Therefore the money you have spent on your belongings should be considered as permanently gone. Rather than seeing your belongings in terms of their possible future monetary value, it will be of more benefit to you if you can see items in terms of the value they bring to you personally.
To stop accumulations on counter tops and coffee tables, dedicate a home for everything you own, it could be a drawer or cupboard. Some items need to be on surfaces, for example a kettle and toaster on a kitchen counter, or a lamp on a nightstand, but you want to reduce surface items to just the essentials. It is common for desks to attract stacks of paper, magazines or old mugs. Ask yourself where the clutter would live if not on the flat surface. It may be that paper could be shredded or filed, magazines put on a shelf and then recycled once finished reading, and cups taken back to the kitchen and washed. The quicker you find a home for new clutter that appears, the better chance of it not building up to unmanageable levels.
The more storage space available, the more things you can comfortably store in your house. In the kitchen for example, you can free up space in cupboards by storing pots, pans and spices on wall racks and hangings.
In most cases, decluttering your home is not going to happen overnight. As long as you keep making progress at a pace that is comfortable to you, be proud of yourself. The aim is not to have a perfect spotless home, but to make life as comfortable and as stress free as it can be. If you have reached a level where you are happy with the state of your house, you just need to maintain things. If you find it useful, a schedule can remind you to keep on top of household tasks.
Decluttering is not just for staging, it’s for life!!
