How to declutter and love your home life
And rediscover objects you value in the process!
For many of us, it’s been an unnerving and worrying few weeks. Between workplaces putting in place measures to allow us to work from home and strict government restrictions that prevent us from venturing out, many of us are finding ourselves spending more time at home than ever before.
Home is no longer a place for us to grab meals or simply crash out after a busy day of working and commuting. At a time when the world beyond our front door seems particularly overwhelming, our home is our sanctuary.
But now that you’ve settled into a new routine and have familiarised yourself with your ‘new’ surroundings, are you suddenly aware of just how much ‘stuff’ you surround yourself with? Since you pared down your work life to commuting to your makeshift home office, are you dismayed to find that the erstwhile spare room has become a museum commemorating your hobbies and interests of the past decade or so?
Our everyday lives have been subject to significant disruption. If you now find yourself with more time to spend in the home that you and your family cherish, why not devote an hour, or even just 30 minutes a day, to winnowing some of the clutter that has built up over the years.
So tackle those presses, the ones you daren’t open for fear of triggering a cascade of old clobber. Throw yourself into a rigorous declutter of the garage. Clear some space for what’s really important: you and the life you really want for yourself and your family!
THE GOAL IS TO REDISCOVER OBJECTS YOU TRULY LOVE
THE first step is to go easy on yourself and not guilt-trip yourself over the mountain of tat you have managed to amass over the years. In a sense, we are wired to invest meaning in things. So it’s not surprising that we form attachments to inanimate objects. Most of us have indulged a natural desire to make our surroundings more home-like by personalising ‘our’ living space with a few finishing touches, say mementos of a fondly remembered holiday, a trinket gifted by a friend, or a tea set that was handed down as a family heirloom.
But in the last few decades, we’ve been hit with a tsunami of inexpensive consumer goods that has filled our homes with cheap electronics, fast fashion and random household junk. Where once it took decades to accumulate a lifetime’s worth of possessions, now we live in a world where cheap clothes, low-cost furniture and budget homewares are easy to acquire.
But if material goods have become easy to accumulate, they are not so easy to live with.
After all, studies have shown that living with clutter is associated with raised levels of stress hormone cortisol. One 2017 study suggested that people make unhealthier food choices when their surroundings are disorderly and crammed with extraneous items.
It seems that those mountains of tat lurking in our homes – the rat’s nest of computer cables, the bundles of long-unworn chain-store sweaters, the DVD box sets that will never be watched – are making us deeply uncomfortable.
So it makes sense to embark on a clear-out now – particularly if you have a little free time and are physically well enough to commit to a little light lifting and sorting.
You should also make peace with the fact that despite your best intentions, there will be items that simply won’t make it out of the house. But that’s not a mark of failure – the goal of decluttering is not to send the entire contents of your home into a waiting skip, but to rediscover those objects that you truly love or that otherwise bring value to your life, and then get rid of the rest.
And it’s possible that you will, in six months’ time, feel a twinge of regret at dispatching the lemon zester that sat in your kitchen cutlery drawer for so many years before becoming a victim of the great declutter of Spring 2020 (here’s where the €20 rule is worth bearing in mind – see Tip box). But focus on the end point: a home that you can feel comfortable in, where you have created room for your life to prosper.
SET A FEW GROUND RULES AND STICK TO THEM
SO, as you embark on a declutter, first set out a few ground rules for yourself to follow. This will ensure a greater rate of clear-out success.
Define the immediate task at hand. Don’t try to tackle the entire garage; select one corner or one set of shelves to sort out initially.
Don’t commit to taming the entire spare room in an afternoon; set a time limit to what you can realistically achieve in half a day (or half an hour, or however long you want to devote to the exercise), and stick to your plan.
Well within reach of the area you are about to declutter, mark out where you will create four piles: ‘Keep’, ‘Donate’, ‘Recycle’ and ‘Dispose’. If your plan is to tackle decluttering in medium-sized daily chunks (say, during the current coronavirus emergency), decide where you will park each pile after each day’s work is done, whether it’s in storage bins or four bin liners. Just make sure that they do not themselves become obstacles under foot.
Even if you plan to spend half a day at the task, take regular breaks – say, every 30 minutes or so. And use the break to grab a glass of water, or change your choice of music.
If you have to clean newly cleared shelves, leave that chore til last, or if this is a half-day job, devote the final half-hour stretch.
Promise yourself that you won’t simply move items from the realm of clutter that’s permanently on display – say, old post or hats and scarves that migrate from pillar to post around the house – to clutter that’s simply hidden away in a desk drawer or the top of a wardrobe.
You may need to come up with solutions to address specific issues, say, creating a designated storage spot for outerwear just inside the front door. Just as a weed is a plant that’s out of place, sometimes clutter is a series of objects that don’t have a ‘home’, or a location in your home where they will always be returned to, and where they can reliably be found.
Remember: a place for everything, and everything in its place.
It can be a daunting prospect, the thought of opening a cupboard that hasn’t been tackled in years and may contain… anything, really. But this is your opportunity to familiarise yourself with your own possessions once more.
You’ll find that what looked like one amorphous mass of stuff that is potentially overwhelming actually contains a lot of dross that no longer belongs in your home and can be either recycled, donated, sold on or disposed of.
You may have put off this job for months or even years because you anticipated an emotional journey that will drag up all sorts of dilemmas about what to keep and what to dispatch. But the act of sifting through your possessions will help you see the wood for the trees. Even if there are items that are simply too laden with memories to briskly assign to the ‘Donate’ pile, you should find that these are outnumbered by items that have clearly passed their sell-by date. If it becomes a chore that you find emotionally taxing, gather the items that are the source of your unease and put them aside for safekeeping. They will keep for another day.
Be firm about what items make it into the ‘Keep’ pile (see panel above), and be even more firm about how they will avoid becoming clutter in the weeks and months ahead. Allocate a home to everything in the ‘Keep’ pile, even if that ‘home’ is little more than a biscuit tin that’s been repurposed as a storage box (complete with a label that notes the contents).
Should you decide that you really do need the screwdriver that’s languished at the bottom of that drawer for the past decade, at least you’ll know where to find it when you need it.
As your ‘Donate’ pile builds, place the items in black bags and put them in a secure location for when the current coronavirus emergency ends and charity shops reopen.
Also consider refining the ‘Donate’ items further: could those old board games go to a family member? Could you sell that old dress jewellery online?
After you’ve completed a successful clearing of your living space, you may be tempted to hit the shops once more, or browse the online portals of your favourite stores. But before you succumb to the lure of the shopping cart, lay down a few rules for yourself.
For instance, ask yourself: How likely am I to use it? Where would I put it? Is it really a bargain?
Try to remember the lengths you went to during your great declutter of Spring 2020, and weigh up whether you really want to go back to square one in a year’s time.
You spent hours identifying which objects were either useful or meaningful to you: are you sure you want to fill up your living space with bric-a-brac and cheap homeware items once more? As we face the prospect of spending more and more time in our homes, do yourself a favour and go through your possessions. As you refamiliarise yourself with what you already own, it should become quite clear what items can and should be dispatched.
Don’t feel under pressure to get rid of absolutely everything. Accept that there will be phases in your life – for example, during those years when young families are growing – where clutter is almost inevitable. And don’t give yourself a hard time if you find it impossible to get rid of certain items: the goal is to reduce the level of clutter, not conform to a model of show house perfection. In recent years, Marie Kondo has led the revolution in tidying up, urging us to hang on to those objects that ‘spark joy’. For many of us, that can be a tall order. But there is joy to be found in knowing that the objects you surround yourself with have value, whether that’s because they are useful or they spark a beautiful memory for you. So let that be your guiding principle in the weeks ahead: removing the clutter of what doesn’t serve you so that the possessions you love may regain their lustre.