The warmer months are finally here and it’s the best season to declutter your home. The last few months may have collected for you boxes of holiday gifts, décor from last Christmas, a mountain of winter clothes, school projects, craft supplies, magazines, and mail – without you noticing the amount of space it occupies in your home!
Whether you declutter to get your closet summer-ready, or to promote a healthy home and mind, this is us telling you that you can do it!
Here are 4 steps to declutter your home this summer.
Draft a Detailed Plan
We become more accountable to our goals if we have a written plan of action put down. Make a detailed list of the most cluttered areas in your home and all the possible solutions.
It could be a closet of your children’s outgrown clothes or a garage-full of scrap wood from last year’s renovation project. Plot at least 2 days for each area so you can stick to your schedule even if some unexpected delays or emergencies come up.
Buy Bins and Bags
As you declutter your home this summer, you’ll find that some of your past storage containers may have become moldy, damp, and otherwise falling apart.
What you can do is invest in sturdy plastic or cloth storage bins and bags – do not buy boxes. This will make your decluttering process easier and actually enjoyable.
Go Room To Room
Most of the time we bail out halfway through decluttering projects is because we try to work on the entire house in a day or over a single weekend. You’ll most likely be surprised how much clutter you’ve accumulate and totally underestimated the time it will take to get rid of all of them.
To make your summer decluttering process more efficient, work one room or area at a time until you have cleaned and organized everything before moving on to the next. Clean out your kitchen, pantry, closet and your garage with these simple tips.
Decide What To Do With The Clutter
Once you have all the clutter in bins and bags, decide as a family whether to donate or sell the items. If you decide to put them up for sale, put them all together in one area so they don’t create new clutter in your home.
If you decide to donate, make sure to ask for a receipt during the drop-off so you can write donated items off on next year’s taxes. As for paper clutter, there’s no other way around it. To handle this, you can sort them by piles section by section when watching TV or when you have free time between chores.
These tips have been adapted from this article by Pretty Extraordinary.
