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Five Top Tips for a Successful Decluttering
There are lots of benefits to having a ‘stock take’ of your home. There’s less to clean, less to tidy up, it creates more living space, and it’s good practice if you are considering a move in the near future.
Hamiltons Removals supply high-quality, competitively priced packing materials from our base on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. Here are our top tips for a successful decluttering, even if you aren’t going to move house soon.
Have a Routine
You don’t need to get rid of everything in one go. Do it room by room, and even then, accept that you may not be able to do the whole room in a day. Setting aside a certain number of minutes each day for decluttering will help you greatly in this regard.
If you have children, get them involved as well, and not just if it’s their bedroom that needs clearing out. You will make them feel part of the process, and they may even enjoy it!
Put Your Possessions into Categories
One way of making progress is to create categories for your items. One of these should be marked ‘dustbin’, another ‘give away’, another ‘donate’, another ‘keep’, and lastly ‘relocate’.
So the first one takes care of all the items that are destined for the rubbish bin, and will be of no use to anyone. Give away can be clothes which no longer fit you, or are of no use to you whatsoever (these can be sold as well as given away to charity shops, friends or family). Relocate can mean putting away somewhere else in the house (even if it’s just putting a pair of socks in the right drawer). And, keep are those items which you still use or can’t bear to part with.
Do all the Rooms
You might think that the main living spaces (such as the lounge) are the only rooms you have to worry about – wrong! The bathroom may be full of out-of-date beauty products and medicines. Similarly, the kitchen may be full of ingredients that are past their best before date.
Again, get the children involved – it is the summer holidays after all. There may also be financial benefit for them if they can sell on old toys that they don’t use any more.
Be Prepared to be Brutal
There may be some things you want to keep because of their sentimental value (such as clothing you wore on a first date, a favourite toy from your childhood). However, these may not fit you any longer and may be full of holes – so is it really worth keeping them for that reason? If it doesn’t serve any useful purpose, get rid of it, or give it to someone else who’ll be able to make more use out of it.
One way of working out which items you use regularly is to only hang the clothes you use the correct way – anything you don’t wear should be put back-to-front. Give yourself six months and see what your wardrobe looks like, then get rid of all of those items not hanging the right way round.
A similar approach can be used with other items too. For example, put all your kitchen utensils in a big box, then only put them into the right drawer once you have used them. Again, give yourself a time limit, and anything left in the box after six months can be discarded.
Buy Quality Packing Materials
Wherever your unwanted ‘stuff’ is going to end up, make sure you know what it is – so put it in a clearly marked container. Even if it’s only going to be in there for a short period of time, you don’t want it to get damaged.
Hamiltons Removals have a range of declutter kits in different sizes – small, medium, and large. All the boxes are extra strong and double walled, so there shouldn’t be any risk of items falling out or being damaged in storage or transit. Tape, marker pens and inventory sheets are all included in the price. The bubble-wrap is also easi-tear for simpler packing.
These packing materials, which are put together at our Harleston base on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, can all be ordered at our online shop.
Safe Storage from Hamiltons Removals
If, after all that, you still haven’t decided what to do with some of your decluttered items, why not put them into self storage until you reach a decision?
Hamiltons Removals have two safe storage sites near Diss, at Harleston (rooms for smaller items) and Aldeby (units for bigger items) on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. Both of these sites are protected by CCTV, and your items will be securely locked. If you would like to know more about our self storage services, click here or call us on 01379 855203.
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