Downsizing & Decluttering Without Pain!
Nothing is as stressful as moving from one home to another. The searching for a new house, putting your current house on the market, advertising your home and interviewing estate agents, packing… there are so many things to think of and these are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s often easy to move from a small house to a large one, as you can easily fill the space. But trying to downsize your home from a larger one to one with smaller rooms and less storage can be a nightmare if you’re not used to living in smaller places.
Downsizing requires you to be ruthless with your belongings, and if you’re the type of person who finds it hard to let go of things, then downsizing can be an exercise in torture for you. Going around your home and making a list of the things that you don’t want to let go of can be too hard, because you obviously want to keep hold of everything possible. Instead, make a list of all the items in your house. Every book, every DVD and every picture should be on this list. If it has a place in your house, you need to list it. Then, sit down and tick the things that you need, then cross the things that you want to keep, then highlight the things that you can let go of.
You can start with listing all the things that you haven’t used in the past six months. You could put sentimental things that you can’t bear to let go of but want to keep into self storage, which would keep it out of your way, but you won’t have to sell or trash it. You can also list the things that you no longer want to keep, but that have value, on websites like eBay and Facebook Marketplace. The stuff you don’t want to keep and cannot be sold on can be then sent to the dump or recycle stations in your town. The chances are that there will be a lot of things that you can get rid of. Magazines and newspapers that you kept for when you’d have the time to read them (which you never found), clothes that no longer fit but you kept – just in case they would one day – these things have no more space in your house and definitely not your new house!
Be practical about the things that you need. Cleansing your home isn’t a hardship or a punishment, it’s actually extremely therapeutic. Decluttering your house gives you a good chance to decide how you want to organise your remaining things. It also gives your belongings a new lease of life as they’ll no longer be cramped up in their boxes and shelves anymore. When you get to the new house, it’ll likely be covered in boxes and the last thing that you need is to slice open those boxes and find even more stuff that you won’t use.
Disclosure: This is a featured post.