September 09, 2019

Published Monday, September 09, 2019 with 3 comments

Declutter, Because You Must


It’s September already and before you know it’ll be autumn. Come autumn and you have to do away with your summer wardrobe and start preparing your home for the Holidays. Prepping up for Holidays includes a whole bunch of activities that can take weeks of work, activities like decluttering, getting rid of junk, cleaning, making space for gifts and holiday essentials and, making your home winter and visitor ready.

Why do we have clutter?

There can be many reasons for your home and wardrobe to be cluttered. Probably you’ve been too busy the year round, too busy to take stock and now you have twos, even threes of most of your things. This is especially true in case of groceries, but sometimes it’s also true for some favorite clothes or accessories for instance, two black pencil skirts, four white tees, three brown bags. Unless you are a collector of sorts, or a hardcore fashionista who swears by a particular thing and have excess of it, it doesn’t make practical sense to stock up on the same thing. You might rather want to utilize the money and space for something different, something you don’t have. Another reason for a cluttered home is the fear of getting rid of things which is called disposophobia or hoarding disorder. In case of disposobhobia, people tend to keep even anything and everything thinking ‘just in case’. In some extreme cases, people have been found to have kept empty boxes, dozens of them, thinking they might come handy in future.

How to go about decluttering?

Whatever your reason be for cluttering, decluttering will more or less have the strategy. If you are in for decluttering, here’s how you can go about it.

1.    Start with a list. Make a list of all the things you need to cleanup. Break your list into sub-lists. For instance, your main list would include kitchen, bedroom, store, attic, garage etc. Kitchen will have its own sub-list which will include cupboard, crockery, spices shelf etc. Make sure that the sub-lists have smaller spaces that you can clean up completely inside of an hour. This is to ensure that you continue on your cleaning spree even on workdays, and do not end up wasting the entire day on weekends.
2.    Now that your list is done, you need to arrange the list in an order that suits you the must. In a logical sequence you should take up your attic, garage, basement kind of places first. Reason being when you clean up the rest of the house, you will have empty place available to hold up items you want to get rid of in different ways, for instance you can stock up things you want to dispose of in a garage sale once your cleaning is finished.
3.    For every place you clean have 3 boxes marked – garage sale, charity and trash. If you can come up with more labels, great. While cleaning, keep back only the things you feel you need, for rest of the things, put them in the appropriate box. Keep stacking these boxes neatly in a spare room or in a corner until you are done with the whole house.
4.    For clothes, if you haven’t worn a particular piece in a year, chances are you won’t wear it ever. Get rid of it. if you have two khaki pants, pick up the one you like better and dispose the other.
5.    One of the most tedious part is going to be papers. If you are into catalogs and magazines, keep the latest issues and get rid of the old ones. Make a separate folder for utility bills. Dedicate one folder for invitations. You could arrange the valid invites in the order of date. Then there are other important papers relating to personal, financial and other important stuff, keep those in a secure folder keeping similar papers together, for instance in insurance section all papers related to insurance go together, bank papers go with property papers etc.

Now that you have done your decluttering, you know it can be a tedious process. Hence, it’s recommended that you make decluttering an everyday habit on not a yearly ritual. It’ll give you so much peace that you will be surprised at how much this almost non-existent problem can consume you.
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3 comments:

  1. Complete rich content and fully informative. Very well written article. Your article is very informative and I liked your way to express your views in this post. It’s a great pleasure reading your post. It’s useful information. Thanks for sharing this article here. Home Cleaning Service North Shore.

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  2. Decluttering can become an important way to practice self-care because it helps you take control of your home, your life and your “stuff” to improve your overall well-being. ... Creating a home that can give you the time, space, energy and clarity to improve your health, happiness and overall well-being! contact us

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  3. Hot on the heels of not knowing how long to keep things, is not knowing how to store things properly. If you're not sure how to store something, it tends to end up as clutter by default: lazy around the house and being tripped over at the most inopportune moments. Or worse, hiding when you need it. https://www.homestagingwellingtonnzpros.info/

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