So now Christmas is over, and the house looks bare, its time to take a look at the house and get it organized for the months ahead.

Benefits to decluttering

·       Less to clean

·       Less to organize

·       Less stress looking at all the mess

·       Less debt – with a cleaner more organized home, you are less likely to buy unnecessary stuff to make the house look cluttered again. You might also be able to sell some of your unused items

·       More energy and the feeling of freedom

Areas to start without feeling overwhelmed:

·       Start one room at a time. If that’s too much, start one cupboard at a time

·       Take before and after photos – that way you get a sense of achievement and it drives you to keep going

·       Start by throwing out the rubbish – take a black sack and just throw out all the rubbish. Depending on which room you are in, this could be the bins, out-of-date food, all the old crusty make-up, and the clothes with holes in them. 

·       Then look at the things you never use or the things you never wear. What is good enough to sell and what is good enough to donate – get a box or a bag ready and fill it. If you pull it out and leave it in a mess on the floor, you will look around and feel like you aren’t achieving anything. 

·       Now look at everything left and make sure it has a place, a home, somewhere where you know it makes sense and you can put it back there when you used it. For example, if you have makeup on a dressing table but also in your bathroom, it's less efficient when you are getting ready. Move to one location so you can organize it and you are less stressed when getting ready. Go through the dressing table itself and put on there the items you use on a daily basis, and find a solution for your extra makeup which – perhaps a drawer unit, or a box or up on a shelf.

·       The kitchen is always full of clutter – twice as many lids for Tupperware as boxes, recipe books we never open except for that one recipe we love to cook every month or two. I gave away loads of cookbooks a few years ago but photocopied my favorite recipes and put them into a folder. It saved me so much room on the shelf and everything I needed was in one folder. 

·       Some smaller additional tips

o   Get rid of those pesky lost socks! 

o   Check the medicine cabinet for all the out of date medication

o   Have a box of things to put away. This will be for things for other places in the home which you found in the place you are organizing. 

o   When organizing your clothes, put all your jeans together, your t-shirts together, your underwear together. This way when you are deciding what to keep, it's easier to see everything you have. 

o   Make sure to always make your bed – it totally changes your view on the space and how you feel when entering the room

o   Label any boxes of storage so you know what is inside – for example, I use the beauty box subscriptions for my beauty products and the medicine cupboard and I put labels on each so I know what's inside

·       Lastly how about coming into the room as though you were visiting friends home. If this was a friend’s home, what would you change? It could be nothing or it could be something simple such as moving items off the side, buying new curtain tie backs, or changing those photos in the frames you have been meaning to do for years.  

Good luck and I would love to see your before and afters so if you put them online, make sure you tag me!