3 Easy Steps and Tips to Declutter Your Home!

Around 80% of the items in your cupboards remain untouched for an entire year. This means that, out of five cupboards in your home, you only use one of them properly! Of course, this does not mean that you should throw away everything in the other four cupboards. Instead, you can declutter them and find another place for the belongings you want to keep. This is a simple way to create more space in your home. Read below how to do this in three steps and discover some useful decluttering tips.

1. Ask yourself the obvious question: keep or throw away?

Many people do not like asking themselves this question. Collecting possessions seems to be in our nature and, in extreme cases, can even lead to hoarding. There are several television programmes that show people whose belongings have taken over their entire homes.

Throwing things away is not something most people enjoy. Around 33% of women keep belongings that remind them of happier times, while 50% find it difficult to get rid of items with emotional value. A simple solution is to divide your belongings into three groups:

• Items I definitely want to keep
• Items I am definitely going to throw away
• Items I want to keep but rarely or never use

For the belongings you rarely use, you can introduce one final test. Put these items aside in the attic and check after four months whether you have used or even thought about them. If the answer is no, you do not necessarily have to throw them away. You can also place them in an external storage unit at ALLSAFE Mini Storage.

You can access your storage unit seven days a week from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. This allows you to keep valuable belongings that you do not use regularly while still being able to access them whenever necessary.

2. Reorganise the belongings you want to keep

After dividing your belongings into these groups, you will probably discover that most items have ended up in the ‘keep’ category. These are possessions that are valuable to you but take up space or make it difficult to achieve your goal of reducing the number of cupboards in your home.

Examples include:

• Items with strong emotional value, such as your grandmother’s old cabinet, photo albums or the cot your children have outgrown.
• Items with significant financial value, such as a coin collection or collectors’ items that you have invested a lot of time and money in.
• Items with social value, such as old board games or a shuffleboard. You may not use them often, but they create enjoyable moments with friends and family.
• Practical belongings, such as skiing equipment, reference books from your studies or seasonal clothing that you do not wear throughout the year.

You do not necessarily have to keep all these belongings inside your home. You can store them in a storage unit at ALLSAFE Mini Storage. Storage units are available in a wide range of sizes, from 1 m³ to 120 m³. Even the smallest unit can hold around twelve moving boxes, which is similar to the contents of a cupboard.

You can access the units from Monday to Sunday throughout the day, making them highly accessible. The storage spaces are secure and heated, so you do not have to worry about your belongings becoming lost or damaged.

Another option is to temporarily lend attractive or useful items to others. A painting or a collection of books could make a friend or family member very happy. When you would like to have them back, you can simply ask.

3. How to keep your home tidy

For the belongings you decide to keep at home, we have a few additional tips:

• Decide which category each item belongs to, but avoid creating too many different categories.
• Keep all items from the same category together in one place. This will also save you time when looking for something. Did you know that people spend approximately 60 hours a year searching for their belongings? That is around ten minutes every day.
• Keeping everything organised can also save you money. Around 5% of your belongings are purchased twice because you have forgotten where you put the original item or believe it has been lost.
• Consider the most efficient way to store your belongings. Use baskets for socks, for example, or try folding your clothes in a different way. Small changes can already save a surprising amount of space.

As you can see, creating more space in your home can be very simple. How many cupboards have you managed to clear out? Let us know in the comments below!