If you are tired of looking at the clutter in your house – you are not alone! In today’s society where we are surrounded by all kinds of stuff, it is so easy to gather unnecessary things. And before you know it, your house becomes overwhelming! It’s time to declutter our homes!
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Declutter with the Right Mindset
While you might be eager to just jump in and start decluttering, stop for a minute and think about why getting rid of clutter is important to you. Defining your why will help to keep you going on your decluttering journey when the initial excitement and motivation wear off. And they will. So think about what you want to gain with a decluttered house.
Before we start talking about how to declutter we have to talk about why we declutter.
Here are some examples to help you get started:
- Less time cleaning and picking up the house
- Easier time finding things I need
- No longer feeling panicked before company comes over
- Less mental clutter so I can concentrate on other things
- Not feeling overwhelmed in my own house
What is most important to you! Imaging yourself living in a space without clutter: how do you feel?
How Do I Begin to Declutter my House?
Now that you have decided on your why, it’s time to figure out how to start decluttering. What is the first step? Where do you get started to help you be successful?
How to declutter the right way?
Start with space that bothers you the most
What has worked for me is to declutter the space that was negatively impacting me every single day. Do you have a space in your house that you have a hard time looking at? Is there a room or an area that instantly makes you feel overwhelmed when you look at it?
That is where you should start!
Why?
Because removing that clutter will have the biggest impact on how you feel in your house and will give you a boost of energy and motivation to keep going in other spaces.
It’s a Marathon and not a Sprint
It is important to realize from the beginning that decluttering is a process. It will take some time to go though your house.
It took you years to gather all the clutter in your house! If you are expecting to do it in one sitting you are setting yourself up for failure.
You have a much bigger chances of being successful by being consistent versus fast. Start with one space in your house and work on it consistently each week. Setup specific blocks of time each week to declutter. Even it that is only 15 minutes at a time.
Determine your strategy
This is where you get to decide what strategy or method you will follow. Will you follow some of the popular methods, or will you do it your way. Or maybe the best strategy is to mix and match depending on a space in your house! If you want to follow a specific set of rules to help you with decluttering, check out some options below:
What are the Rules of Decluttering?
Before you completely dive in into the decluttering process, let’s talk about some general rules that will help to make this process successful.
The main rule: get rid of things
This might sounds so obvious! But I have failed decluttering so many times before because I did not follow this simple rule.
Instead of getting rid of clutter, my concentration was main on making sure my things were nicely organized. So instead of decluttering, I was simply organizing my mess.
And guess what? While it looked nicer, I still had a ton of clutter in my house!
If you want to know how to start decluttering successfully – you have to get rid of things first and foremost!
Limit your ‘just in case’ category
We all have been there!
I don’t need this right now, but I want to keep it ‘just in case’. I might need it one day.
I’m not saying you should automatically get rid of it. But give it some thought? If you will actually need it one day is it easy and inexpensive to replace?
And make sure you don’t keep multiples of the same exact item ‘just in case’.
Get a ‘maybe box’
There will always be things that you are not sure of. You simply find yourself sitting over an item and thinking whether or not you should get rid of it.
This will be especially the case at the beginning of your decluttering journey. It definitely gets better as you go through your house.
But one of the tips I have learned from The Minimal Mom is to put those items in a plastic bin and store somewhere that is out of sight. So maybe a garage or a basement. Give it six months.
After six months have passed, you will see if you ‘actually’ needed or even thought about any of the items.
This is a really easy way to ‘gently’ help yourself realize which things you actually need and which you do not.
If buying stuff hasn’t made you happy, maybe getting rid of it will
Jashua Backer
Don’t move the clutter
Have you ever started decluttering and as you are going through some things you make a pile of things that don’t belong to that particular space? But instead of looking through the things to see if you want to declutter, you simply move the pile to another room?
That is simply delaying your decision and making more clutter in another space.
Don’t bring new clutter to your house
This is a hard one! But when you are going through a house decluttering process, try to be very strategic about what you bring to your house.
Declutter your space completely before buying new things. That way you will have a better idea of what items you actually want in your newly clutter free space.
Don’t buy organization items too early
If you start your decluttering process by buying nice containers and bins, you are setting yourself up for failure. You will try to fit your clutter into the new organization items and will likely end up keeping more things.
Go through your items first.
Declutter your stuff and than start organizing it.
That way you are are not organizing your clutter but creating organization solutions for the things you have decided to keep.
How Do You Declutter When Feeling Overwhelmed?
If you are feeling overwhelmed just thinking about all the clutter you have in your house, you will need a simple strategy on how to declutter.
You need compartmentalize.
In other words don’t look at your house a whole but rather as a group of individual small spaces that need to be decluttered. And they you concentrate on talking one space at a time.
Having a simplified, uncluttered home is a form of self-care
emma scheib
This way you are working on decluttering one space or one room. And when that space is done, you simply move to the next.
The more overwhelmed you feel the smaller the space you should start with. It can be a closet or even one drawer in your kitchen.
Not only will this help you feel less overwhelmed, but it will also provide you with a ton of motivation. You will experience a snow ball affect. You will see all the decluttering progress you have made in one space, feel proud of yourself for the progress, and then be excited to keep going!
