5 Tips to Help You Declutter Your Home

The coming of the New Year always ushers in a host of optimistic new goals. People want to lose weight, spend less money, and declutter their homes. Many of us are natural pack rats, collecting things we believe we need and keeping them. But gathering items and keeping them organized are two very different things.

A cluttered home is not only disorganized but can affect you mentally, making you feel overwhelmed and depressed. Organization gurus say a cluttered house is a cluttered mind, preventing you from moving forward in life and achieving real freedom. Here are five tips to help you declutter your home this year.

1) Start small.

Wandering from room to room trying to make sense of the clutter is overwhelming. When you declutter your home, start by tackling one room only, and just one corner of it if necessary, and focus only on that small space. Throw away any garbage, recycle papers, and dust or vacuum the space. This accomplishment will give you confidence for tackling the next space.

2) Let go.

Keeping unnecessary stuff is a mental burden. Pare your household items down to only those things that you use often. If you haven’t used the item in more than a year or forgot it was even in that drawer, toss it. You won’t miss it a week later. If throwing things away seems too wasteful, consider donating useful items to a local charity or thrift store.

3) Make it fun.

Set aside a whole day when you have nothing else to do to tackle decluttering. When you know you don’t have any other commitments for the day, you won’t feel stressed and can even have a little fun. Put on some lively music and get your trash bags ready for sorting.

4) Find a place for everything you keep.

One of the biggest hurdles to decluttering your home can be the random stacking of items everywhere. This is easy to do. We all put things down on tables, next to beds, and on top of other things in the garage, believing we will return later to put them “away”. But the problem comes when there is no actual assigned place to put anything.

After you have pared down your inventory, create a place for every single thing that you’ve decided to keep. Use crates, drawers, and hanging organizers strategically so that you always know where everything will be.

5) Fork out the money for a dumpster to declutter your home.

This is not the cheapest solution, but when you declutter your home, it can be a lifesaver. Dumpsters make the act of pitching absolutely cathartic, and since they are dropped off and picked up for you, they save you the burden of having to cart off or even bag any trash. Plus, you will only have it for a short amount of time, so it may motivate you to declutter the entire house quickly.

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