With your busy schedule, keeping a neat and tidy home is a tough task to accomplish. Even with your best intentions, chores get pushed to the back burner and clutter piles up. Once you’ve let it go, the idea of putting it all back together again can seem overwhelming.
Breaking down the decluttering process into these 5 easy steps allows the mess to seem more manageable…
- Make a list. This method of organization may seem like an obvious start but remains a step that many overlook. Take your overwhelming clutter and throw it all out on paper. The act of classifying each room and ranking the ease or difficulty of different tasks will allow you to gain a more attainable picture of where to start with the decluttering process.
- Give yourself 5 minutes. Again, once so much clutter has accumulated around your home, the idea of cleaning things back up is a heavy task. Instead of looking at the whole house as one single task, evaluate the work, instead, in 5-minute increments. Pick a room, work for 5 minutes, and walk away. You’ll be surprised at what only 5 minutes of concentrated decluttering can do.
- Implement the 4-box method. Each time you put yourself to work on a particular area of your home, keep with you 4 boxes. One for trash, one for give away, one to keep, and one to relocate. Although it might be hard at first to choose which box to put each item in, you’ll quickly learn to keep a looser grip on the things that you can easily do without.
- Give away one item each week. Continuing with the 4-box method in mind, challenge yourself to give away one item each week. Although it might seem hard at first to let go of your possessions, you will likely start to find yourself giving things away more frequently when you experience the freedom of less clutter.
- Closet hanger experiment. Many of you have probably heard of this strategy before, but the simple task of moving around a few hangers in your closet will reveal to you just how many items of clothing you own but do not wear. Start by turning every hanger in your closet around backwards. Then, when you take an item out of the closet and wear it, you can turn that hanger back around to the correct position. This separates the clothes that you have now worn with those that you haven’t. After six months or a year, look at all of the hangers that are still turned around backwards and consider getting rid of those clothes that you never wear.
Once your decluttering is taken care of, then you are left with the task of general housecleaning. Give The Clean Haven a call today and allow us to help maintain your house to be the castle that you deserve!