Living in a dark, cluttered and claustrophobic space isn’t too good for you health, and it’s no fun either! That is why it can be incredibly valuable and worthwhile to take the time to clear your home of unnecessary items, and a create a spacious and airy interior. Of course, this often more easily said than done, especially if it has been a long time since the previous clear-out. That is why we have come up with a simple guide to help you below.
One: Find some motivation
Before you start getting the rubbish sacks out, you need to ask yourself why you are doing this? What is your motivation? Be as specific as possible and choose reasons that are the closest to your heart.
Things like, so your home is a safe environment for your family so you can have more house guests over, and so you can keep it cleaner and improve your health are the type of thing we mean.
You need a good motivational reason to keep you going, even when things get hard. They will get tough too as turning a property that is jam-packed with stuff into a spacious and airy one, takes a lot of work.
Two: Inspiration
Next, to help you with your task look for some inspiration. This may come in the form of tidying and organizing guide like the Konmari method.
Alternatively, you may find some images online or in magazines of the type of home you would truly like. Cut these out or keep the images on your phone, and then you can refer to them if you ever get overwhelmed by the task ahead of you.
Three: Review what you want to keep
The third stage is, instead of looking at all the thing you have to get rid of, take stock of the stuff you want to keep. What is it about these items that you like? Is it their particular function, there aesthetic, or their sentimental value. Once you have identified this, you can then you use it to guide the rest of your decisions in what to keep and what to throw out.
Four: Be ruthless with the rest
You may not think of yourself as a ruthless person, but to succeed at this task, you will have to be. This is because it’s so easy to be scared of making financial decisions about throwing things away. When in reality all this is doing is making the whole process a lot more difficult.
To that end, you must have a maximum of four piles when you are cleaning the clutter from your home. One is for the items that you will keep, one’s for items you are not sure about, one’s for the items that can be donated, and one is for the items that must be thrown away.
To help you to commit to the throwing away process, it can be helpful to get in a professional company that can offer junk removal services. This then gives you a deadline to work to and can make it much more likely that you will get rid of more junk than if you were to take it to the landfill yourself.
Five: Don’t put it away, throw it away
Another important tactic when aiming to create additional space in your home is to ban the use of a junk room. Of course, loads of people have these in the form of an unused guest room, garden shed, attic or garage. However, they are problematic for several reasons.
The first is that they are a terrible use of space in the home. Square footage is at a premium so why fill it with stuff you don’t really use and limit your family’s living space?
Next, these rooms are usually so full of junk that you can never get to anything in them anyway. Something that means you forget you have it and learn to live without the item, demonstrating that you don’t actually need it and it could have just as easily been thrown out.
Lastly, having a junk room is really just a procrastination method for folks that don’t want to make a final decision about throwing stuff away. All you are really doing is delaying the inevitable, so you might as well throw it away now, instead of putting it away to be chucked at a later date.
Six: Dealing with the I don’t know pile
Things that often find their way into the junk room are the items that end up on your don’t know pile, from when you are clearing out your home. These are things that you don’t really want, but feel bad about throwing away for some reason.
The trick here is to identify that reason and deal with that. It could be that you feel guilty for throwing things away that have been given to you as a present, even if you don’t like, or use it? You may hate the idea that you have wasted money and so wish to hold onto things even though they are just taking up space?
Once you have sorted out the reason, you can challenge it logically to see if it is a rule that you really want to live by. If in the cold light of day, it sounds a little silly, then you free yourself to get rid of the stuff and create more space in both your mind and your heart.
Seven: A new approach to home decor
Last of all, once you have gone through all the hard work of creating a more spacious home, you need to follow through with a change in perspective.
Basically, you need to change your attitude on what you bring into your living space, whether that is home decor items, purchases, or common or garden bric-a-brac.
Don’t allow anything to enter the living space if there is no real use for it, or if you’re not 100% sure that you love it and have a place where it could look wonderful. In this way, you can stop your home becoming overcrowded and keep it a spacious haven in which you and your family can live.
