We can all benefit from a little encouragement to declutter our homes, so The Store Room in Preston has come up with some tips to help you declutter.
Decluttering is about removing unnecessary items from your home, and this can have several benefits to you:
- More calming environment and reduced stress
- Increased productivity
- Rediscover items you thought you had lost and were gone forever!
- Easier to clean!
But how do we get started? Below is a list of tips to help you declutter your home.
Allocate Time To Declutter
If you try to declutter whenever you can fit it in, then the process will feel like it’s taking forever, and you will become demotivated. Try to set aside a specific time to declutter a room because you will see how much progress you have made which will encourage you to keep going.
What To Do Before You Start
Decide what are your priority areas and use this as your guide as to which room to start first. Don’t put pressure to complete a whole room in one go, sometimes it’s easier to break a room down into different sections and give yourself smaller targets, for example “I will declutter the cupboard in the sitting room by the end of the day”.
Ask For Help
Decluttering your home can sometimes feel like a mammoth task, but if you can ask for help from family or friends, it can make life easier (even if it is to just keep you entertained while you are sorting through your belongings).
Get Some Motivational Music On
If you can’t get a friend to help you, put yourself in the right frame of mind by listening to something. Put on your favourite playlist to keep you happy and motivated, or that podcast you haven’t had the chance to listen to yet. This will make time go by much quicker and you will be clutter free before you know it!
Does It Spark Joy?
Marie Kondo’s message of sorting by checking if items spark joy is very useful to help you decided whether you need to keep something or not. We are all guilty of wanting to keep things that we haven’t even looked at for 3 or more years, so really think about whether you need it.
Keep, Sell, Donate Or Bin
As you are going through your home, split the items into different piles – we recommend you have four piles for keeping, selling, donating, and binning. This means you will be decluttering in an environmentally conscious way to make sure things don’t just get put into landfill.
If you do plan to sell things give yourself a finite time to do so. This means you won’t have items that are “definitely going to sell” hanging around for months (or even years) after you have decluttered your home. Be realistic about the time it will take to sell items and see if you want to invest the time and energy to do so.
Storage
Invest in storage for your home to make sure everything has its place. This could be a new cupboard or even just storage organisers like drawer separators – all of these will help keep your space clear of clutter!
You could also use self storage for your seasonal items, like garden furniture and Christmas decorations, or for those precious items that you may not need right now, but still want to keep, for example, heirloom pieces, favourite toys, furniture, or children’s art and other school work. We have stored all sorts at The Store Room, so whatever you need to store, we can help!