Decluttering your Home: Where to Start

If you find that you need to tidy your home regularly, you may need to think about decluttering. A home that is consistently messy can affect your mental and physical health, make it hard to invite guests over, and cause you to spend a lot of time tidying up. By decluttering, you can remove some of the sources of untidiness and make the maintenance of your home a lot more manageable.

Decluttering is the process of carefully examining your belongings and deciding what you want to keep, what you can afford to throw away, and how much storage space you have to keep your possessions organised. If your home gets untidy very quickly or is consistently messy, decluttering can be a useful way to make a long-term change. It offers a fresh start and the chance to develop good habits, so that you can keep your space organised without spending all of your time tidying up.

Here, the experts at Clever Closet will explain how you can start the process of decluttering, working from the philosophy behind the approach to offer practical tips on tackling mess and fighting the causes of clutter. This can help you to create a welcoming space for you, your family and your guests and encourage you to take pride in your home.

What types of clutter are you dealing with?

Before you can solve the problem of clutter, you need to understand it. This can also offer insights into the behaviours that are creating mess in your home. Are your untidy rooms filled with rubbish that you need to throw away, or tools that need to be stored safely? Are there piles of clothes or other things that need your attention? Do you habitually leave things on tables to remind yourself to deal with them, only to forget anyway? Do you have enough space to put away all of the things you own?

If bad habits are to blame, it is of no use to ignore them or to beat yourself up. Start by recognising and acknowledging how your behaviours are creating the problem and you will be able to develop strategies to overcome the challenges of clutter. There may be one source of clutter or a combination, and you should approach this process differently depending on the nature of the problem.

For example, if the clutter consists of items relating to unfinished tasks, unopened post or things that you are not ready to put away, you may need strategies that will help you to be more organised. Alternatively, if you find yourself leaving things out because you don’t have room to put them away, approach decluttering from the perspective of creating new storage space and managing your existing storage more efficiently.

How can you get more organised?

The fundamental principle of decluttering is making sure that you absolutely need everything you are storing in your home, and then finding a place to store it. Usually, this means working systematically through every item you own to decide whether or not you can throw it away – and if not, where will you put it? This usually reduces how many belongings you have that can turn into clutter and makes it easier to tidy up, because everything already has a place assigned to it.

To start, the fastest way to make a big difference is often to work through your home room by room and throw away any rubbish and anything you know that you don’t need. Starting with an initial sweep where you deal with any items that you can discard without needing to think about it will save time later and help you to understand the scale of the mess that you need to deal with. In many cases, this will also make rooms look a lot tidier straight away, which can also give you the motivation to keep pushing on with your decluttering project.

From there, work through the items cluttering your floors or other surfaces. You can focus on one room at a time to make the process more manageable, but don’t fall into the trap of moving things into different rooms rather than making concrete decisions on whether you will store or discard them.

You should also consider the items in storage – if they aren’t contributing to the clutter, is that because you don’t use them very often? Could you create more storage space by taking things out of storage and discarding them?

Once you have determined which items you need to keep, consider where they will go. In particular, it is important to make sure you have enough space. If you don’t, there are three options: create more space, throw more items away, or accept that they will remain clutter forever.

How can you create more storage space?

The most obvious way to create extra storage space is to buy more furniture, but this is not always viable, especially in a small room (or a small home). You can rent a storage locker or other facility for items that you don’t use regularly, but this is not always the best approach. A storage unit can be inconvenient and expensive, and if you are keeping your possessions in there for the long term, it raises the question of whether you need to keep them at all.

If you are certain that you need to keep everything that you have left after the decluttering process, but you don’t have anywhere to store it, there are a number of nifty hidden storage solutions you can use to create more space. An under stairs storage solution like those from Clever Closet creates a structured storage system in the unused area underneath the stairs. This can be a perfect way to add more room to store things without taking up any extra floor space, and there are other solutions that provide similar benefits.

By ensuring that everything you own has a dedicated space in storage, you won’t need to worry about where to put things when you tidy up. This also makes it easier to put things away after you have used them, and if there are things you still need to deal with – items that you need to fix or use – you can put them away and be certain that you can easily find them again when it comes time to take whatever action you need to. You could also create a space where unfinished projects or tasks can be stored, which will make it easier to stay on top of any outstanding work.

By approaching decluttering in this way, you will only need to do it once – or significantly less often than you tidy up now – and it will be much easier to maintain a clean and tidy space on an ongoing basis. In this way, you can ensure that your home is always ready to receive guests and that you feel calm and comfortable in your space.

By Ruth Kelly, Marketing Manager, Clever Closet