10 Creative Ways to Declutter Your Home

Whether it’s a yearly spring clean or a more frequent clear-out, decluttering your home helps freshen up your space and can relieve any stress that has been building up within you over the increasingly cluttered rooms of your home.

Decluttering your home is no small feat, but by picking a few creative methods that work for you, you can conquer the mess building up around you. Removing items from your home will make it easier to connect with what remains and to clean and remain organised. 

It’s easy for clutter to build up, so in addition to figuring out a strategy to reduce the volume of possessions within your home, it’s worth implementing a system to keep it that way. Below, we’ve covered 10 creative ways to achieve your goals and declutter your home.

Our 10 Steps to Declutter Your Home Quickly

1. The Four-Box Method

Let’s be honest – one of the most common reasons we struggle to let things go is that we believe that the moment we throw something out, we’ll suddenly need it. But if you’re holding on to boxes of clothes that no longer fit you or gadgets that you don’t use but always think, “Maybe one day”, perhaps it’s time to try the four-box method. Get set up with four boxes, and label them Keep, Donate, Sell and Trash. Start with one room, and as you work through the various cupboards, sides and other places where you’ve stashed your clutter, put the items you’re sorting into one of these boxes. Be brutal with yourself. Drop it in the trash box if it’s a hunk of junk. If it’s something interesting but you just never use it, put it in either the donate or sell box, and if it is something you love or use regularly, keep it.

2. Digital Decluttering

If you hoard every letter and document that comes through your door, maybe you should consider digitally decluttering your home. It takes some time to set up, if you’ve got a sizeable backlog of old letters you want to preserve, but scanning them and saving them into cloud storage will allow you to easily store and access them in ways you could never do with the huge pile of loose letters currently kicking around your kitchen drawers. Remember to use a secure password and turn on 2-step verification to keep your documents safe.

3. Tame Your Spare Wires Draw

Everyone has one – the drawer full of tangled wires. We know why you keep them, too; they surely all have a use, right? From old adapters to 25 individual USB charger wires, they’ve built up over time.

A great way to declutter your home is to take the time to round up all the loose wires, adapters, and power cords and get rid of what you don’t need. You’ll find you have so many duplicate wires, especially for anything related to your PC, that it makes no sense to keep them all. If you’ve got two devices in your home that need a kettle lead and you’ve got six kettle leads, that’s four wires that can go.

Once you’ve finished untangling your cables and deciding which spares to keep, we like to coil them up and pop them into Zip Lock bags. This allows us to quickly rifle through our spare wires and find the one we need without them getting entangled again.

4. Multi-Functional Furniture

If you have the funds to invest in furniture improvements that allow you to better store and organise the things you do need to keep, your sides can be kept clear. Think of things like ottomans or beds with drawers underneath.

5. Make Use of Attics and Basements

Attics, basements and voids (such as under the stairs) can be fantastic places to store things away that you don’t use but can’t bear to part with. Assuming that these are currently uncluttered, you can use them to store neatly packed items.

Invest in damp-resistant boxes, like the popular “Really Useful Boxes”, which come in a range of convenient sizes, so you can organise your books, DVDs and CDs, or grab a large one and store all your children’s soft toys. In that way, even though you’re just moving boxes of loose possessions from the main part of your home into storage, you’ll soon declutter your home. 

6. The 12 Month Rule

As we touched on above, one of the main contributors to clutter in the house is hanging on to things because they might be useful one day. If you’ve got things lying around that you’ve not used in a year, then you aren’t using it – so get rid of it. That can be by donating or selling it, but either way, it has to go out the door, not just be moved to the donation pile and later returned to the shelf it’s lived on for over a year.

7. Declutter by Zone

If the idea of attacking the whole house is giving you anxiety, start with a room that can give you a quick win, or focus smaller and just clear out a wardrobe or chest of drawers. Completing that one task will give you the momentum to declutter your home.

8. Clear Surfaces

Do you have a kitchen surface, shelf or other flat area covered in letters, hairbrushes, kids’ toys and other assorted junk? We do. It’s affectionally nicknamed the Shelf of Shame. You can avoid creating your own shelf of shame by being conscious of how you use your flat surfaces. Make it a rule that everything has its own place, and it is not the coffee table, countertop, shelves or other flat surfaces unless it is appropriate for it to be there.

9. Purge Regularly

No, we’re not talking about diets. By regularly purging your house of unwanted clutter, you’ll keep on things and not need to call in a home decluttering service to save you. Clear out unwanted bits and pieces once every quarter to keep things fresh.

10. Hire a Professional Mover and Cleaners

If this seems like too much work and you’ve got the budget to cover it, you can hire a local removal company to shift any unwanted goods to the tip or move them to long-term storage. Residential cleaners can get all your sides spotless (along with the rest of the house) and before you know it, you’ll feel like you’re living in a palace again.

Cleanco Commercial Cleaning – Brisbane’s Premier Cleaning Company

Unfortunately, decluttering your home takes times, we completely understand that! While we can offer you plenty of advice on decluttering your home, we concentrate our services on offices, care homes, schools, hospitals, and other commercial sectors.

Contact us today to discuss your commercial cleaning needs. We’ll happily provide you with a custom quote for cleaning across a wide range of sectors.