How to Clear your Clutter Once and For All

Learn how to clear your clutter once and for all with our simple to follow clutter cleaning strategies perfect for families. I love a calm and clean home but I am not a fan of all the hard graft that constantly cleaning means. Instead, I am all about working smarter not harder and the best way I have found to do this is by eliminating or embracing my clutter. By instituting small habits that break the cycle of clutter and eliminating the spaces and routines in our home which always seem to magically breed more work. So I want to share with you a system that works and you will not be decluttering on a regular basis anymore. once we have covered decluttering we are going to move on to my top cleaning tips, I mean why clean more than you need to!

Let me explain: Do you have a space in your home that always accumulates clutter or you seem to need to continuously tidy? Often a spot on a dresser or sideboard or even a dining table that is covered in “stuff” that you have to clear off before you eat or clean.

These are the danger areas that you need to focus on and figure out why they happen, how you can stop it from happening or if you can’t stop it from happening how you can contain it in a calming way as it is much easier to lift and bowl or basket to wipe and clean rather than 43 small items or pieces of paper. So we are going to work at clearing your clutter once and for all and that means that you never need to chaos clean again!

A Place for Everything and for Everything a Place

There is a reason that this proverb has been in use since the 1600’s as it really works, however, often we have way “everythings” for our places which is why there is such a massive focus on storage for our homes. In an idea world it would be wonderful to have enough storage space for our things, but I am sure like me you are always on the search for the perfect storage solution (a bit like the holy grail).

Instead of looking for more storage, we are going to focus on using the space we already have. Lockdown made me realise that it is key to use all the space I have in my family home. That understairs cupboard that I couldn’t open the door and had been closed for ten years was changed into a pantry and the stuff inside which hadn’t been seen or used in ten years was donated or recycled.

As much as I would love my family to always put everything away where it belongs. I discovered we have three “junk spots” the shelf as you come in our front door, the kitchen breakfast bar and the stairs! And the thing with these pots is they seem to breed more junk, as though once something is placed there it just encourages and attracts more clutter.

How to Clear your Clutter Once and For All

Embracing your Junk Spot

Once you have established your junk sport you have to decide if you are going to eliminate or embrace it. This depends on what sort of clutter is congregating there. Let’s take my shelf as you come into the house. It was keys, dog lead, masks, hand sanitiser, sun scream, sunglasses, small change and things that people took out of their pockets as they entered the house or went to grab as they left the house. This was a natural place for these items and I needed to embrace it.

So I found three small baskets to contain the clutter and then every so often I will empty the baskets and sort through them, but everyone knows that is where the dog lead or the spare key is. We also have another two baskets – one for clean masks and one for masks to be washed. In fact, our tiny hall has to hold a lot of our things. So it has a coat rack and a basket under that with our hats in (which I swap over seasonally and keep the others in the garage).

Eliminating your Junk Spot

It is much harder to eliminate a junk spot and clear the clutter than embrace it and it really needs a collaborative family effort to do it for good. First off you need to work out who is adding the items and what items they are adding. So you need to take an audit of items before putting them all away and then see if it keeps happening. Then you need to figure out if you are going to deal with it alone or take it on as a family.

For example the breakfast bar in our kitchen had become a spot for clutter ranging from receipts, pens, face masks, hand cream, odd kitchen items, tape measures, screwdrivers etc. So it was never going to be a one woman job. I need to enlist the help of everyone putting things there and the daft things was it was happening due to people not knowing where to put things.

It is all well and good having a place for everything, but you need to tell your family where that place is!

Once the husbeast knew that the empty biscotti tin on the shelf wast just for decoration but actually held our receipts and guarantees he started to put them in there. I am not going to lie there have been times when I have been called a nag and we still have a junk drawer in the kitchen for the tape measures and glasses screwdrivers! But I placed a pretty kitchen bowl on the counter and the odds and sods go in there and then once a week we empty it and before you know it people learn where things go. Today that bowl has a pack of Uno cards in it and an open pack of Haribo.

We often are guilty of asking people to tidy up when they have no idea where things go. So for us, the biggest changes happen when we work together as a family. for me, the biggest change I had to make was to stop assuming that people knew what I wanted doing or how I wanted it doing. To clear the clutter for goof you have to work with everyone in your house. Otherwise, you will be the only one invested in it.

Do you have any junk spots in your home that cause you to despair?

Baskets are a great way to clear your clutter and coral like things together.

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