Tips to Declutter Your Home

*This is a collaborative post on tips to declutter your home

Thinking of reordering your home with a good decluttering? In this guide, we’ll provide some top tips you should take into account for decluttering your home from making a plan to considering hiring a cleaner to help.

Decide when to declutter your home

Before all else; you’ll need to have a clear idea as to when would suit you to declutter your home. More than likely, you’ll have to set aside two days for the work. In most cases, this means choosing a specific weekend, although if you’re free during the week, you could always opt to declutter your home on a different set of days (e.g. Wednesday and Thursday).

Whatever the case, you’ll want to carefully consider what two or so days would work well for you. If in doubt, you might find it best to hold off until you have 2+ days where you are absolutely sure you’ll be free. 

You may want to take an alternative approach and extend the decluttering process over two weeks (e.g. do half the work one weekend and half the work the following weekend, thus allowing for shorter work days). 

Beyond that, you may even prefer to declutter very gradually over time and then maintain the standard you slowly achieve over the course of weeks or even months, perhaps with 30-60 minutes here and there spent on decluttering once or twice a week.

Make a clear plan to declutter your home

Once you’ve decided when you want to declutter your home, it’s critical that you put together a thought-out plan/rough schedule.

You’ll need to set a realistic timeframe for yourself. As with many DIY projects, things can often take longer than expected. 

Also, it’s super important that you include breaks in your schedule. You should take at least two 30-minute breaks every 3-4 hours and work for 6-8 hours at most. Basically, you could treat it like a workday.

During these breaks and even when you are busy decluttering, be sure to stay hydrated throughout the day with sufficient water intake and have enough food on your breaks to keep your energy levels up. 

Along with employing a thought-out schedule, you’ll want to use a variety of bin liners to categorise items as you go. Given the importance of this aspect of planning, we’ve completed a separate tip for this in itself.

Use different bin liners to organise items

You’ll want to carefully organise items as part of your decluttering efforts with clearly labelled bin liners. 

You might have one bin liner for items you’d like to put away in the attic, another bin liner for items for recycling and an additional bin liner for items you want to give to charity. Obviously, you might decide to use another bin liner to put away items that you intend to put back up, but maybe in different locations.

Back to the labelling, getting this right is immensely important for obvious reasons. On the one hand, it would be a nuisance if you accidentally placed items for charity in the attic (delaying the process when you were eager to donate them sooner), but it would be something of a disaster if you were to recycle items you wanted to keep in the attic or to put back in place throughout your home.

While you could use coloured stickers (multiple stickers would be ideal), you could even opt for different coloured bin liners. Of course, a mixed approach might also work, such as one in which you use black bin liners for items you want to keep and put in the attic and white bin liners for items you want to donate to charity or dispose of. 

Either way, we recommend labelling these bin liners with names, too, just to be extra sure you don’t get mixed up. Lastly, check the contents of the bin liners before you throw anything out, donate items, etc., just to be extra sure!

Anyhow, all in all, planning out carefully and using a smart label system for bin liners is a great way to efficiently and cautiously declutter your home.

Carefully think about what to keep and what to let go of

It’s best to spend a decent amount of time thinking of what items/sort of items you may want to throw out and then giving it some thought when dealing with individual items, especially if they strike you as something you’re unsure of whether to keep. 

While you shouldn’t fear letting go of items you don’t really need or want, thinking ahead can help avoid any regrets when sending off items to a local charity, recycling facility or otherwise.

Consider hiring a cleaner to declutter your home

While decluttering your home DIY can save you money, it can use up a lot of time and energy. And for those with a particularly busy schedule or/and those who’d much rather put their feet up on a Saturday night and watch something on Netflix with a beverage, it may be best to hire a cleaner.

Along with taking a workload off your shoulders, a professional cleaner will likely complete the job more promptly and efficiently. Professional house cleaners tend to charge somewhere in the region of £10 to £25 per hour. 

As a result, the cost of having your home decluttered may be somewhere in the region of £30 to £800, depending on the size of your home and the extent of the decluttering needed. You’ll likely want to spend time discussing your ideas/vision for your revitalised home with the cleaners ahead of their work.