How to De-clutter your House

It's often said a man's house is his castle, and with some of the amount of clutter we manage to squeeze into them, we'd need a castle to house it all. 

It's easy to have the urge to hoard things, it's okay - we all do it from time-to-time. However, there are those times when we just let things get out of hand, and deciding to keep one bit of clutter turns into keeping 100 bits of clutter, we know then that we need to do something. 

There's recently been a series on the television my mum's been watching and people I know have been watching. It's called 'The Hoarder Next Door' (channel 4), and it deals with individuals who just hoard clutter and can't bear to throw any of it away. One interesting thing that was brought up, was that hoarding is becoming increasingly more common, and more and more people are filling there homes with clutter, only to not be able to de-clutter at a later date.

1. Designate Places

Clutter doesn't always form in the shape of rubbish or something that is brought into the home, but can be items that are just out of place. When an item is not in its usual home, it becomes clutter. Anything that is getting in the way and is not supposed to be where it is, is clutter. 

For example, if my toothbrush was left by my workspace, it would be of no good to me there and would only get in the way. Therefore, becoming clutter.

Having set places for things is a great way to help you organise your home to how you want it to be. You can have somewhere for your keys, somewhere for paperwork, somewhere for shoes, etc. The list goes on. It also saves you the hassle of having to search the whole house because your wallet/purse has been buried amongst the mess.

2. Step-by-Step

When wanting to de-clutter your house, I will agree, can be an overwhelming prospect. So instead, decide to focus on a small area of the house everyday and aim to fully de-clutter it. This can be in the form of a cupboard shelf or a whole room, the choice is yours. 

I know someone who used this technique because they didn't have the time to spend de-cluttering the whole house. So when de-cluttering, they started with the kitchen and did one cupboard a day. At the end of a fortnight, all kitchen cupboards had been effectively de-cluttered. 

The key is consistency. A great motivational technique you may consider for this method (and one that I personally use), is the 'don't break the chain' rule.

3. Timeboxing

As-well as the 'don't break the chain' tip, another effective, motivational, productive technique, is timeboxing. I won't go into in this post as I've already written a previous post about it here: What is timeboxing?

4. Pick and Move

Take it upon yourself to move ten items a day back to there original place, or find them a new place, or throw it away. It may only be ten things, but by the end of the week it's added up to a respectable seventy. 

5. Be decisive

In a lot of places where advice is given about how to de-clutter your house, a common tip that comes up is to create a 'maybe' place. The idea behind it being that you can decide what to do with certain items later on. 

Whilst this is a good idea and I can see the logic behind it, when it comes to something as big as your house, I would have to argue that it's a hindrance. The reasons being, the things that you aren't sure about are most likely going to become clutter once again. 

Also, once you start placing items there, there is going to be a temptation to place items there too often, leaving you with the dilemma of how to sort them out.

So try your best to be as decisive as you can. Normally quick snap decisions are the best route to go down.

6. Schedule De-cluttering days

This is similar to point #2, but instead of doing a chosen spot, dedicate a whole day to de-cluttering your house. Maybe it's every Saturday each week?, maybe every Wednesday every fortnight? Whenever it is, just make sure that your committed enough to seeing it through. 

7. Clutter-free zones 

The aim of this tip is to eventually get your whole house clutter-free. First you start off with a small space, lets say the dining room table for example. From now on, no clutter whatsoever can be placed there. 

At the start, it will probably slip your mind a couple of times, but if you're stern with yourself, you'll notice that you'll soon be in the habit of placing things elsewhere instead of that once-messy table. Then once it's ground in enough, choose another small space in the house and make that your second clutter-free zone. 

While this is a slow process, as you need to personally get used to not giving in to bad habits, that's a reason it's so effective. It gets you to start treating clutter in a different light. After you complete the first few clutter-free zones, it will become progressively easier to stop cluttering.

8. Just throw it

This is the hardest thing about de-cluttering. We convince ourselves that each bit of clutter will have its use one day and that we will need to keep it for then. In reality, within five minutes of it being thrown, we've more than likely forgotten about it. 

If we do then keep something that we ought to throw away, that will only lead to bad habits. It may only seem like one thing we're keeping, but once we make the exception, we then make lots of exceptions, and by the end haven't really gotten any further than where we'd started.