Useful Tips For A Clutter-Free Home

Have you been to the mall lately? Bought anything new at the furniture store? When was the last time you used it? Humans have evolved to become consumers. Every day, we buy things that catch our eye, most of which we don’t actually need. And later, we have a problem letting them go. And so the items sit there on our shelves, not really being used, or looking particularly nice… they’re just there. This leads to the creation of a very bad habit – cluttering. If you find yourself in a problem where you finally manage the time to clean up the clutter, only to have it accumulate around the house again, not a week later, keep reading, because we just might help you out.

Start with yourself

You wouldn’t be reading this article if you didn’t have a problem with clutter in your home. What’s more, you also wouldn’t be here unless you already tried to deal with it, and faced failure, maybe even several times. We can offer helpful advice in the following sections, but the vital part starts here. Try to understand why you have trouble keeping your belongings to a minimum. Whether it’s disorganization, tendency for hoarding, or even slight signs of depression. So the first advice is to see this as a problem with no easy fix. It will require work and discipline until it comes as second nature.

De-clutter habits

To ultimate goal in making your home clutter-free is not just in cleaning it up, reorganizing and being done with it until it clutters up again. The actual aim is to create a number of small de-cluttering habits that you will stick to. These include:

·         Putting back daily-used things into their proper places

·         Not leaving any cleaning “for tomorrow”

·         Cleaning up the kitchen after every meal

·         Keeping up with the projects around the house

The important thing is to locate the most common clutter-accumulating areas and also make it a habit to check them frequently, and invest a little more time and effort in those places.

Prioritize

The hardest part by far,prioritizing requires planning out and deciding which items in your household need to go by answering one question: what counts as clutter in your home? Usually, it’s old clothes, furniture or crockery you never use. However, there are also things with sentimental value. Or at least, the value you attribute to them. Given how this part can be a bit chaotic, especially if you realized there are too many things you need to get rid of, you could find yourself not knowing where to put them. Luckily, there are storage solutions where your belongings can stay for a little while, until you find a new home for them.

Slow down the accumulation

Say that you’ve successfully and almost painlessly removed the excess items in your house. To ensure your home remains clutter-free, aside from developing good habits, think about clutter BEFORE bringing something home. Every time you want to buy something, like a decoration, or a piece of furniture, ask yourself: do I need this? Do I have a place for it? How often am I going to use it? How is it improving my life? We are consumers, and it’s in our blood to want to buy and obtain items – both useful and useless. But once we begin to analyze our purchases, and leave nothing to whim, the odds of containing our inner hoarder increase. Try it, you will thank yourself later.

Final thought

Keeping a well-organized home is far from just an organizational skill, or need for cleanliness. It stems from a lifestyle we learned at home, and it governs us until we make a conscious decision to change it. De-cluttering is a stressful process that requires a lot of strength to detach from object we believe possess emotional value, as it will only be true with a small percentage of our belongings. Your home should hold things that are either beautiful to look at, or highly used, on a day-to day basis. But to reach that mindset, you have to prepare yourself mentally, and start getting rid of things you don’t need. Only later does reorganizing and creating healthy cleaning habits come in play. Keep in mind: nothing comes over night. De-cluttering is skill that needs some time to develop, and even more to master.