Decluttering and reorganising your home can be a great way to clear your mind, keep your hands busy, and enjoy a satisfying end result.
After having a good sort out, many people feel motivated to reorganise other areas of their lives too. So, if your life has been feeling cluttered and disorganised lately, why not take some time to tackle the contents of your bathroom cabinet, or sort through the clothes you no longer wear?
Below, we’ve created a handy guide to give you some ideas on how to make the most of your living space and help you get started.
Hopefully, you can enjoy your decluttering and reorganising journey just as much as the end result!
Why should I declutter and reorganise my living space?
It’s a good idea to make time to declutter and reorganise your living space at least twice a year. Here’s why…
Decluttering and reorganising can boost your energy
Often, when we start making a series of quick decisions about what to keep and how to organise things, our brains enter ‘doing’ mode. This boosts our productivity levels, making us feel more inclined to keep working through our to-do list for that day.
You might find that you finish decluttering and still have enough energy left for a run, or to try that carrot cake recipe you’ve been meaning to get around to.
When you sort through your things, you may find lost treasures
Nearly all of us have experienced the joy of being reunited with an item that we’d forgotten about, or thought was long gone.
For example, I recently found a ‘lazy arm’ contraption that clips to any flat surface and holds my smartphone, for a hands-free experience. I got it for Christmas one year and had never taken it out of the box, but I’ve now begun to use it when completing home workouts and chatting with friends and family during video calls.
Decluttering and reorganising can reduce anxiety
Human beings are drawn to order and symmetry, so when things feel scattered, messy, or out of order, we can feel anxious. So when we take steps to restore order to our surroundings, it can help us to feel calmer.
Alan Lightman, an American physicist, writer, and author, says, “I would claim that symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships.”
Having a less cluttered, more organised living space can reduce family tensions
Clutter can be stressful and make daily living less enjoyable. Every time you open a cupboard and something falls out, or you can’t find your keys and spend 15 minutes looking for them, it can bring out feelings of tension and frustration. And in these moments, you’re much more likely to snap at those you live with.
Therefore, being able to find everything you need easily can help to reduce stress levels and put you, and others, at ease.
Decluttering and reorganising can boost confidence
As you sort through your things and try to work out how you’re going to make it all fit into a particular space, you use problem-solving skills to make a series of quick decisions. You’ll need to work out what to get rid of and how you’re going to organise the things you want to keep.
This process can help you build confidence in your problem-solving abilities – especially when you sit back and admire your hard work at the end.
6 easy steps to help you declutter and reorganise your home
1. Choose an area to focus on
If your whole home needs decluttering and reorganising, this might be overwhelming; but it doesn’t need to be. Organising your home is something that can be done over a few weeks, months, or even years.
The most effective way to get started is to pick a single area of your home that you’d like to tackle, and leave the rest for another time. It can be helpful to start with an area that’ll benefit you most. This is often rooms we spend the most time – for example, the kitchen or your bedroom.
You might like to try some of the decluttering ideas in the video below to get started. There are 100 different ideas, so why not start with five to 10 and see how you get on?
2. Let it go, let it go...
For many of us, letting go of items that we no longer need can be tricky.
We often know that we don’t really need five pairs of sandals or that old tea pot, yet we can’t shake thoughts like, “But what if I need it again in the future?” or “[Insert family or friend’s name] gave it to me so I better keep it.” Thoughts like these can convince you that the only option is to keep things that are simply weighing you down.
Parting with items you’ve had for a long time can stir up a range of different emotions, and some people panic at the thought of letting things go. Often, however, once you start, you’ll see that it’s okay to let items go and the rest of the decluttering process will become much easier.
If you’re finding it difficult to make a decision about whether to keep something, ask yourself whether you need it and whether your life would really be much different without it. What would you use it for? How often would you use it? And could you easily forget about it if it was gone?
If it becomes apparent that you’re holding onto something simply because you want to avoid parting with it, let it go. If this is too difficult and you’re not convinced that you won’t miss it, try placing it in a bin liner somewhere out the way for a month. If you don’t reach for the item or you forget that it’s there, it’s safe to say that you don’t really need it.
You might find our article, 8 tips for minimalist living, a useful place to start.
Alternatively, organising consultant Marie Kondo has a popular Netflix series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, which shows you techniques to decide whether to keep items or not – especially those that hold sentimental value, as these can be particularly difficult to say goodbye to.
Marie suggests holding items one by one and deciding whether each one sparks ‘joy’ or makes you feel weighed down. If it doesn’t spark joy (or doesn’t have a regular, practical use) she suggests letting it go.
She explains this process in the clip below, but it’s definitely worth giving the full series a watch! If you don’t have Netflix, you can still access plenty of decluttering and organising tips and tricks over on her YouTube channel.
If you need any extra motivation, it’s also worth remembering that you can make money by selling items you no longer need. There are numerous places to sell your unwanted belongings online, such as eBay, Vinted, Gumtree, and Facebook Marketplace.
For example, you can often make money by selling your old mobile phones rather than letting them sit in a drawer unused. You can find more advice in our article; How to make money from your clutter.
When selling second-hand items online, bear in mind that HMRC has introduced new rules that mean some people might need to pay tax on the income they make from their sales. Whether you’ll have to pay tax will depend on your circumstances. You can read more about this in our article, Will new HMRC rules affect how I sell things online?
3. Sort items into piles
The decluttering process can be made much easier by sorting items into piles.
For example, you could create…
- A pile of items that you don’t need but are in good enough condition to be sold on eBay or donated to a charity shop.
Try to be selective about the items you donate and stagger your donations to avoid overwhelming charity shops.
Before donating, consider the condition of the item – is it worthy of being sold? You could also consider listing items on Freecycle, where you can give things away to people who need them, for free.
Alternatively, check out our article; How to make money from your clutter.
- A pile of items that are damaged beyond repair or that constitute ‘rubbish’.
It’s worth considering which of these are made of recyclable materials (e.g. plastic, glass, and cardboard) and placing them in the right bins.
You can use this recycling locator to find out where you can recycle specific items locally. - A pile of items that’ll be useful to you once they’re fixed or cleaned up.
This pile is by far the most rewarding and will give you something to do on a rainy day.Store items from this pile somewhere with easy access so they don’t get forgotten about. You can then chip away at fixing and cleaning them when you have some spare time. There’s something very satisfying about restoring items that with a bit of TLC can start adding value to your life again.
For some inspiration on how to fix up and repurpose your old items, check out our article; 16 creative upcycling ideas that could save you money and help the planet.
- A final pile of things that you know you want to keep.
Sorting things into piles can help to speed up the organising process, and it can also make letting go of items you no longer need much easier.
For example, if you know that certain items will be passed onto others who can give them a second life, this’ll hopefully help to ease any guilty feelings you have about not keeping them yourself.
Similarly, placing items in a rubbish pile (because they’ll be of no use to anyone else) can help remind you that these items have run their course, and that it’s okay to recycle them or throw them away.
4. Get creative with storage space
Once you’ve decluttered, the next thing you’ll need to do is work out what to do with the space left, and how you’re going to organise the things that you’ve decided to keep.
One of the best things about decluttering is that it helps you to identify the items that really matter – which are usually the ones you’ll use most regularly or that bring you joy. For this reason, it’s important to organise your space in a way that caters to this and allows you easy access to these items.
This is your opportunity to think creatively about your storage space – which can be a lot of fun! For example, if you’re organising your kitchen cupboards, consider inserting a piece of tension curtain rod to hang cleaning sprays or food packets.
For clothes that you won’t reach for this season, you could also try vacuum packing them and storing them out of the way. This can help to make more room in your wardrobe for clothes that will get plenty of wear in the coming months.
Read our article, 20 clever storage solutions to maximise space in your home, for ideas. Or, YouTube is also a great place to look for decluttering and organising inspiration. I’ve selected a few of my favourite videos below…
Inspiration for organising a cluttered kitchen pantry
Inspiration for making the most of storage space under the stairs
5. Take before and after photos
One of the most rewarding things about decluttering and reorganising your home is enjoying the end result. However, throughout the course of the decluttering and reorganising process, it’s easy to forget how a space looked before.
A fun and useful way to keep track of your progress can be to take before and after photos. This can be incredibly satisfying and make you feel really good about what you’ve accomplished.
Hopefully, once you see what you’re capable of doing with a few spare hours and a bit of determination, you’ll feel inspired to declutter and reorganise other areas of your home or life!
6. Make your own decluttering rules
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to decluttering – though it can help to spend some time considering why you hang on to things in the first place. Do they bring you comfort? Do you simply forget to throw things away and before you know it they’ve piled up?
If you can get to the root of what causes the buildup in the first place, you can take conscious steps to prevent it from getting out of hand.
When I moved into my flat, I spent a good few days decluttering and organising. I realised that I’d brought a lot of things with me that I didn’t need and didn’t have space for in my new, smaller home. Since those first few days in my new home, I’ve become much more mindful of the things that I bring home with me and/or hold onto. If it’s not useful for the foreseeable future, it has to go!
Everyone is different, so it’s up to you to come up with a method of decluttering that works for you.
Perhaps you could get into a regular routine when it comes to donating to charity shops. Some people commit to decluttering and making donations every few months. Whilst others who struggle with the idea of giving away lots of their belongings at once, or who prefer to keep on top of their clutter, might give away a few items every couple of weeks.
Additional ideas that you might find useful
Now that we’ve run through the basics of decluttering and organising, I thought it would be helpful to run through some of my favourite decluttering and organising tips…
View your home as though you’re visiting it for the first time
It’s not uncommon to stop noticing clutter in your home when you see it every day. Sometimes, we even become used to annoying habits, like things falling on us every time we open a cupboard, or tripping over things that are in the way.
This is why it can help to take a step back and try to view your home through the eyes of a visitor. What would they think if they were viewing your space for the first time? Using this method can help you to identify areas that are in the greatest need of improvement.
Make use of labels
It can be much easier to create order at home if things live in places that are easily identifiable. You can buy baskets, hampers, and boxes pretty cheaply on Amazon or eBay – which you can add your own labels to. For example, you can use them to store shampoo in the bathroom, herbs and spices in the kitchen, and/or screws in the garage.
If everything has its place, you’ll be much less likely to keep things that don’t fit into these and will hopefully be able to avoid building up too much clutter. If you’d like to make your own labels, you could consider purchasing a handheld label maker from Amazon.
Consider using a decluttering checklist
Sometimes, the problem isn’t that you own things that aren’t useful, it’s that you own too many useful items. For example, things like towels and kitchen utensils are always handy, but this doesn’t mean that you need to keep three garlic crushers and 20 towels.
Donating spare working items to charity shops can help overcome the barriers to saying goodbye, knowing that you’re helping a good cause.
If you have too many or lots of different items in your home, it can help to run through a decluttering checklist. Becoming Minimalist has a great one here.
Make your bed
When you’re looking at decluttering and reorganising your bedroom, it’s always a good idea to start by making your bed. In many cases, a bed takes up the most space in a bedroom, so when it’s unmade, it can make the room look and feel more cluttered.
For me, when my room is unbelievably messy, I often feel overwhelmed and want to avoid the mess rather than tackle it. Making your bed can make a big difference to how the room looks, and make the task ahead seem more manageable.
Always consider whether you can repurpose items
Just because an item is no longer useful in the way it was intended to be used, this doesn’t mean that it won’t be useful in another way.
For example, I recently found myself with too many plant pots and nowhere to keep my washing-up sponge, scourer, and brushes, so I decided to use one of my disused plant pots as a holder.
When I moved into my flat, I also found that my over-door hooks didn’t fit my new bedroom door frame, so I decided to hang them on the radiator instead and use them as a place to dry small pieces of wet washing. Repurposing items is really satisfying. It’s a great feeling to know that you saved money and avoided creating waste.
For big decluttering jobs, acknowledge that you’ll have lots of cleaning to do
As clutter builds up, so does dust and dirt, so it’s likely that as you begin to sort through things, you’ll uncover areas that need a good clean. This is especially true in difficult-to-reach cracks and crevices.
There’s a great Facebook group called Mrs Hinch Cleaning Tips, which is full of cleaning advice and storage solutions. You can ask for advice on specific areas you’re looking to clean, and share your own results with others.
Final thoughts...
We hope that these tips for decluttering and reorganising your home have been helpful. And remember, the key is to be easy on yourself; try making a plan and tackling clutter bit by bit.
For more house and home content, head over to the home and garden section of our website. Here, you’ll find a variety of helpful articles, including 8 ways to make your home cosy and 24 things to add to your spring cleaning checklist.
Have you recently decluttered or reorganised your home? Do you have any additional tips that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.