This week, I really want to explore and share with you how you can organise your home to start leading a less cluttered and more positive life. From not only my own personal experience, but those of others too, you can greatly improve the quality of your life through the tidying and organising you do at home.
With everything going on in the World right now (I’m writing this during April 2020…), we currently find ourselves somewhat confined to our homes. But this shouldn’t mean that we despair!
Of course, the current pandemic is utterly tragic and devastating across the world. I am not trying to dismiss that at all. However with all the negativity attached to this that we find on the News, social media and in public, now more than ever we need to focus on protecting our mental health.
Many of us have more time at home right now. Even if you’re still working from home, there’s plenty of extra time, for example your morning and evening commute! It’s the perfect opportunity to work through some home improvement projects, DIY, deep cleaning and reorganising.
Mental Health and Organising Your Home
If anyone follows Mrs Hinch on Instagram, you’ll be well aware of the positive affects cleaning alone has on your mental health and wellbeing. Mrs Hinch shares her daily, weekly, monthly cleaning tips and tricks with her followers and inspires them to take cleaning room by room and task by task.
Just like cleaning, organising your home and getting rid of any clutter you may have lying around, can significantly improve your mental health too. By spending time to go through your possessions, decide what to keep, what to donate to charity or throw away completely, can lead to positive changes in general behaviour.
You will be less likely to feel over-emotional or angry because you’ll no longer be surrounded by clutter and chaos.
Having a clean and clutter free home makes you feel better about yourself.
A clean home = a clean mind.
A well organised home = a positive and clutter free mind too.
The Core Steps of Re-Organising Your Home
First of all, you’ll need to go through your current possessions. But don’t panic! The following steps will help you to break this process down into manageable chunks.
1. Make a list of every room in your home.
2. Then you’ll want to break down each room by the various pieces of furniture you have there.
For example, you might write “Master Bedroom”, and underneath that have, chest of drawers, bedside tables, wardrobe and dressing table.
Once you have a list of every room and the various areas you wish to tackle and organise, you can then take it day by day or week by week and go through the list systematically.
When you’re going through each room and area, you’ll want to follow the next steps:
3. What do I absolutely need? / Cannot live without? Keep these items in one pile.
4. Which items don’t I like anymore? Can they be donated? Or binned?
5. Which items don’t I need anymore? Or don’t serve any purpose? Then decide whether to donate or bin!
Once you have the items you’re keeping in a pile, you’ll need to put them back into the piece of furniture they came from! But wait for a sec… You don’t want to be shoving all the stuff back in without a thought as to how you can access and use them in the future.
I’d highly recommended following the “KonMari” approach by Marie Kondo and organising items to be stored within boxes, then put back into the cupboard or drawer. That way, you can easily see what you have and find what you need.
The Essentials to Organise Your Home
When you start to go through the items you’re keeping, it’s important to have the right types of storage boxes and cardboard boxes to organise things properly. The idea is that everything you will be regularly using should be organised into boxes (such as old shoe boxes, gift boxes etc) so you can see everything inside from looking down into the box. Anything else that may be seasonal items should be stored neatly away into larger storage boxes.
Here are some key organising tools to help you get started:
The Extras
Once you have been through all of your main possessions that are stored away within cupboards, drawers and wardrobes etc, you will want to address some items that you have on display. For example, your coffee and console tables, dressing tables and all those other bits!
I have found some really handy storage items that will help:
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and have found the points raised informative and inspired you to organise your home! How do you organise your home? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!
Best Wishes,
Jessica xo
