Getting organized is the first step towards reaching many places; it is where most journeys begin. Let’s suppose you are moving somewhere, you will pick only the things extremely essential to you.
If you are looking forward to selling your house in a peak season for a fantastic price, you want potential customers to see it at it’s best. Or simply put, even if you just want to live easily in your house, decluttering is the first door to knock at.
Staying organized and keeping the clutter away doesn’t only make your life easy around the house, but it also magically improves your overall lifestyle.
Decluttering can be difficult at times, especially when you have so many things that you have barely used. No worries though! that’s the exact thing we are going to nail in this post. Here are the 21 handpicked tips on how you can maintain a clutter-free home like a Ph.D. in home organization.
Read also: 15 Small Space Home office Ideas That Totally Gobsmacked Me
1. Make the necessary mindset beforehand
There is a difference between decluttering and organizing. Organizing is when you only have stuff that you actually need but is in bad shape, scattered, and disarrayed. A cluttered space, on the other hand, is a disorganized space with a good number of things that you don’t need at all. Things that you barely use or are extra.
Brew a cup of coffee, sit in solitude and make your mind on the following realities:
- Less is more and minimalism is the best option.
- There are people out there who badly need what you have in extra.
- Fear of running out of things is totally unreal as you are not living alone in a jungle.
- Fewer things mean more peace of mind and a happier life.
2. Get the entire family onboard
Get the entire family to get on the decluttering mission by assigning independently manageable tasks. With everyone working in cohesion towards a single goal, decluttering will not only become easier but also enjoyable.
With someone cleaning the fridge alongside, by the time you decide on which things are going to go back in, your fridge will already be ready. Let someone deal with the trash while you look after the donation package.
3. Know What exactly Needs to be Done
Take each room’s “before” photographs to help detect essentially what needs to be cleaned away and which storage options can work for each space.
It won’t harm you or the look pf your house if you let clutter stay in a few places. You don’t have to remove all the miscellaneous products from your house. Always ensure that you limit certain items to an orderly junk drawer or relatively small place. If you have any more clutter that may be able to fit in your junk drawer, you can see if a junk shelf suits your needs.
4. Take Everything Out Of The Space
To declutter your house and organize it, you will have to identify what’s really in your house. To know about the things you have you need to take out everything that you can see from the drawers, cupboards, closets, and cabinets. Once you’ve got a clean slate, it’s simpler to sort out what you need to keep and how you choose to organize it.
When all is out in front of you, take a couple of minutes to give it a comprehensive cleanup. Wipe the tables, clean the corners, scrub or sweep the flooring, etc. If you are taking care of a large amount of space or have a very cluttered place that you’re focusing on, divide the space into more manageable parts so you’ll be able to go through everything in your limited length of time.
5. Define the destination of each item/group of items
Often decluttering can be a waste of time, instead of helping you save some. Why? Most often, because you are not doing it right. You are just moving things back and forth around the house without a well-defined strategy at hand.
The fix: Pick a pencil and a notebook, look around the house and enlist everything under one of the following categories.
- Keep
- Donate
- Trash
If you want to eliminate this step, take two large plastic bags or cardboard boxes, tag each as “Donate” or “trash”. Start filling them with items you don’t need anymore. Be generous to the donation box, let just-in-case things slip into the box as well.
What to do with the donation package? While the trash will go where it belongs to, you can deal with the donation package in many ways. Many people collect a bunch of old clothing or unwanted things and donate them on occasion likes Thanksgiving or Christmas. They sometimes hand over the bags full of things to the unprivileged, or maybe when there is a charity event. You could always give away something you don’t need even if there’s no big occasion.
6. Organize the Holiday Decor and store
Organize holiday accessories by boxing products as per the name of the holiday. Rather than discarding centerpieces and wreaths, wrap the objects tightly in fabric or plastic wrap and cover it with a plastic bag. Mark every package, then stack it in one location.
Because these items are used once in a while, organize and store them in places away from your everyday living space. Use plastic bins instead of cardboard boxes. Plastic bins with lids are cush, moisture, and dust resistant.
7. Organize The linen closet differently
Sedate difficulty between many of your linens and things by using canisters, containers, and customizable shelving to organize and separate items. It will also help remove clutter in the closet by folding all things properly and grouping each shelf as per space.
Arrange need-based zones, and what tasks and projects are routinely performed. For instance, put caps, gloves, and slippers in a container by the front foyer in the closet so you’ll be equipped for the cold weather when you’re going out or coming in.
8. Hack into the drawers to make them function even better
Drawers are great at hiding a range of items including clothes. Just because they hide anything thrown at them doesn’t mean they don’t require organization.
- Stack clothes vertically instead of horizontally for much easier access.
- For jewelry, use compartment boxes.
- For almost everything else including kitchen accessories and clothing accessories, add drawer organizers for a permanent declutter.
9. Convert that jumble of jewelry into pieces of art
It can be boring and exhausted to untangle the necklaces and bracelets or look for that perfect earring. To store your unique sparklers, using artful hanging jewelry stands and elegant cases can be a great idea to avoid cluttering and staying organized.
The distinction of costly and cheaper pieces, as well as silver and gold pieces, will further reduce the clutter and make it easier for you to find the jewelry that you need.
10. Paperless Recipes or personalized cookbook
We all enjoy recipe books, but how often do we try the recipes? Check your favorite recipes, and search for other recipes online, build a digital directory to save them all in one folder.
Not tech-savvy? Nothing to worry about. Print or tear your favorite recipes out of magazines and books, and place them in plastic pockets. Your personalized cookbook, exclusive to you. You can order a cookbook binder to spice up your recipes.
11. Regulating Receipts is easier than you thought
A tabbed pocket or folder is a valuable tool to help overcome the bill-related clutter. It holds the wallet clean of all those lost bits of paper that seem just to float around and support budgeting.
You can also beautifully manage your receipts digitally by scanning and organizing using mobile apps like Expensify or Smart Receipts.
13. Go smart with chaotic cords and power cables
The spaces in the home office underneath the table, and behind the entertainment center, are always a growl of cables. With proper planning and strategy, you can organize cords and power cables such that they are both safer to handle and look attractive.
Take time to find out which cord corresponds to what and use color-coded Identification tags to filter the mystery out. Use cord-organizing accessories like clips to keep the cords arranged.
14. Your fridge can do more than just cooling
Your fridge is one of the coolest things in your house! Right, not only because it cools things, but it also stores. With a little workaround, your fridge can do what nothing else in the house can.
Besides sticking promotional magnetic cards, here are a range of things you can do for a perfectly organized and neat fridge:
- Add a stackable wine bottle storage.
- Use washable refrigerator mats for vegetables.
- Use reusable silicone bags for fruits.
- Confine the movement of fridge content by adding different bins and containers like soda can containers.
Maintain the organized house
Now that you have invested your time and energy to organize the home, it’s time to keep it decluttered. Though keeping an already tidy home clean seems less of a job, it still needs some serious work strategies. Just abide by the following set of smart rules and rest assured that your home will always stay gorgeous.
1. Create Some Rules
Your planning system will likely have to be updated over time. It involves returning to the room every now and then to allow modifications and improvements to ensure it continues to work successfully. Setting guidelines about how often you’re going to go back to space to do a fast declutter and reorganize (this shouldn’t be huge, because you did the initial big declutter). You must mark these sessions on your monthly schedule so that you can still coordinate and manage the areas of your home
We know decluttering can be tough, but it’s your choice if you want to be in a house where you can only find stacks of trash or a house that is all organized. The choice is yours.
2. Buy Only What You Need
If you are shopping for the home, focus on the people who live in the house than people who visit once in a blue moon. Once you start shopping as per your real needs, you will be able to eliminate a lot of clutter quickly at the same time, saving tons on junk. If you’re serving dinner daily for 20 people or party as though it’s the motive of your life, you can still retain a clutter-free or even organized home as long as you’re straightforward and care less about display or “just in case.”
Many people love hoarding, and if you are one of those, then you need to change this habit to become clutter-free.
3. Overdoing will do more harm than good
People who love the concept of organizing and arranging things are naturally attracted to all forms of containers, bins, and shelving structures. This is good until it becomes an obsession. Bringing in too many of these items will make the organization even harder. They need to accept that that those very products will cause even more cluttering in the house, particularly if purchased without foresight or in huge quantities. Ensure that you have decluttered as much as possible and arranged your things with the containers that you already have. If that isn’t enough, check out the best sorts of the organizers before you grab more.
