Is your home overflowing with stuff? Even if you have no idea where it’s all come from, all that extra stuff reduces free space and can make your home more claustrophobic. Decluttering is easy once you get started, so here are some tips to get you going.
Clear Out Your Kitchen
Most of us have plenty of clutter in our kitchens without realising. Ask yourself, “When was the last time I checked my kitchen cupboard for expired items?” If it’s been a while since you decluttered your kitchen, take this opportunity to go through every cupboard, and make sure that you have removed anything that’s no longer needed.
Check all your draws of kitchen utensils and ask yourself if you really need all of it. Do you need 3 bottle openers? Are all these loose batteries dead or not? And, where and why the hell did you get a novelty corkscrew shaped like a pig?! Yes, it’s adorable that you can use its curly tail to uncork your wine, but is it worth all the extra space it takes up?
Throw a Yard Sale
A yard sale isn’t just a great way of getting rid of some of the clutter from your home but also an excellent way of earning yourself a couple of extra bucks. If people are willing to give you a bit of money for some of your old stuff, it makes sense to sell it instead of just giving it away for free.
The hardest part of a yard sale is encouraging people to turn up. Sure, if you put a sign up in your yard and then lay everything for sale out on tables, you may well get some interested passers-by taking a peek. But, if you want this to be a successful exercise in decluttering, you need to attract some decent footfall.
Making a post on social media advertising the yard sale is a good start, but you need to reach out beyond your social media friends. Why not print out some flyers letting people know when and where you will hold your yard sale? These flyer templates for Adobe Spark make creating quality flyers easy for anyone.
Slim Down Your Book Collection
Look, I get it. Books are important. But, realistically, all the books in our homes fall into three categories – the books we will actually read at some point, the books we want to have read but won’t ever actually read (no one has really read War and Peace), and the books that we keep around purely for decoration.
The point is, even if you genuinely love books, you probably don’t need all the books you have in your home. You may consider a Kindle to be heresy, but e-books take up a hell of a lot less space than physical books do. If you need to make room in your home, get rid of the books you no longer need.
Cleaning out our homes is something that most of us put off for far longer than we should. However, it’s much less work in reality than it is in your head. If you need more space in your home, it’s time for a round of ruthless decluttering.