Getting rid of excess clutter in your home can reduce the amount of housework you have to do by as much as 40 percent. It might take a bit of effort to declutter but it’s worth it in the long run.
Decluttering doesn’t have to be time-consuming though. Let’s look at some simple ways you can declutter and organize your home.
Tidying Your Closets
Start by emptying your closet completely. Find a staging area where you can see everything and store everything there.
While the closet is empty, clean all the surfaces. Wipe everything down to get rid of any dust, dirt, or grime. This can be part of your Earth friendly spring cleaning routine.
Once the closet is clean, put everything back but keep it organized. You can organize by type of clothing, color, season, or whatever makes sense to you. This helps make it easier to find what you need when you’re in a hurry.
If you’re stacking folded clothes, use dividers to keep the stacks in place. This looks tidier and also makes it easier to find what you need.
If you think you have too many clothes, use the “hanging backward” hack to find out for sure. When you hang your clothes, put them on the hanger backward. When you wear them, hang them back up the right way. After six months, donate or give away anything that’s still hanging backward.
Get Rid of All the Paper
Paper accumulates quickly. Newspapers, junk mail, magazines, and other documents arrive daily and tend to pile up. Getting rid of paper will help declutter your home even if you don’t do anything else.
Buy a shredder. Documents you need to save for record keeping can be digitized with a computer scanner or even by taking a picture with your smartphone. Save the scanned image and shred the original.
The same goes for your kids’ artwork. It can be hard to part with but over the course of many years of school, it can pile up. Keep it for a while but then take pictures to have as keepsakes and get rid of the originals.
Organize Your Home Room-by-Room
Spend a short time every day decluttering a room or particular area of your home. Even five or ten minutes every day will make a noticeable difference pretty quickly.
Instead of a fixed amount of time, you could also work toward a specific goal. Filling a single garbage bag is a popular way to do this. Commit to filling one garbage bag every week.
Try the Four Box Method. When you’re cleaning something up, get four boxes – trash, give away, keep, and relocate. Everything you touch has to go into one of the four boxes.
Or make it a challenge, such as the 12-12-12 challenge. Choose 12 items to donate, 12 to put away, and 12 to throw away. You can use whatever number makes sense, of course.
Optimize Your Storage
When buying furniture, choose storage-friendly options. For example, choose a bed that has space underneath for storage containers.
Make the storage part of your home’s decor. This could be a storage chest that doubles as a bench or attractive baskets that can store things out of sight.
And finally, maximize the use of your time. If you’re waiting for something, such as a pot of water to boil, use that time to organize your home. It may only be a couple of minutes but it’s a couple of minutes that you don’t have to worry about another time.
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