Almost every home has some amount of clutter. But for many homes, especially those with multiple people living there or a few children, clutter can quickly take over your entire house. Luckily, even as you’ve accumulated items, you can also find ways to deal with those items in a healthy and productive way. To help you do this, here are three ways that you can start to drastically declutter your home.
Setup The Right Process
The best way to begin handling all the clutter you have in your home is to setup a process for tackling it. Trying to look at the house as a whole may be too overwhelming at this point. Knowing this, you should take your home room by room and only focus on one area at a time. When you’re in that one area, Elizabeth Larkin, a contributor to The Spruce, recommends that you have a bin for things that you need to put away, things to throw away, things to donate, things to fix, and things to recycle. Once you have everything sorted into each of these five categories, it will be much easier to take care of what each item needs.
Focus On Storage
For the things that you’re not throwing away or giving away, you now need to figure out what to do with them so they’re not constantly cluttering up your space. If you have items that you don’t use but occasionally, you may want to get a storage unit so you can still have access to these items without having to keep them at your house. Within your home, Caitlin, Moscatello, a contributor to HGTV.com, recommends using things like bins, baskets, hooks, ottomans and more to store your items in a way that’s not easily seen. This will help you create a space for everything to go so they’re not cluttering up your floor or counters.
Know How To Handle Paper
One of the biggest mountains you might have to tackle is all the paper you’ve accumulated. Even in a world where almost everything is digital, somehow we still seem to always have stacks and piles of paper everywhere. To address this issue, Andrew Mellen, a contributor to the Huffington Post, advises that you sort through all paper as soon as it makes its way into your house. If it’s necessary to keep, put it in a bin or file that you can then neatly store. If it’s something you don’t need, recycle it or toss it. And for kids’ papers like drawings or art projects, take a picture of it and then store it in the cloud so you can always have a way to see it without having to physically hold onto it.
If you need some help decluttering your home, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you do just that.