THE BENEFITS TO DECLUTTERING YOUR HOME
I get asked a lot of questions about our home over on Instagram which I try to answer as best I can, but I thought I'd write more in depth explanations over here on the blog about how we have made our home a functional, enjoyable space for busy family life. I thought I'd start off with one of the most frequently asked questions, which is,
Where is all our clutter?
Now being a past hoarder this one makes me smile as it was such a different story a few years ago. I was the Queen of Stuff. I kept EVERYTHING, there wasn't a surface free of trinkets and such. Our home was packed to the rafters, not to mention a garage and multiple storage cupboards bursting at the seams too. Think Monica's cupboard from Friends, we had five of those. Oh the shame.
Back then I got a strange comfort out of keeping everything, either from a sentimental point of view or convinced we would have need for it in the future, so how could I possibly throw it out? Of course that 'future need' never happened and everything just collected dust, and slowly without realising it, it started to overwhelm me.
Then the best thing possible happened to us, although at the time it felt like a ginormous hassle. We sold our flat leaving ourselves with a four month gap before our new home was ready to move into. Where exactly we were going to house a family of four and all our many belongings for four months we had no idea. We eventually found a fully-furnished holiday rental that definitely took care of where we would live, just not all our stuff. Our belongings would need to go into storage.
As everyone knows selling and buying property is an expensive affair and now we needed to factor in storage costs too. I knew it was time to be brutal when it came to my hoarding tendencies. I decided we would only pay storage on what we truly needed and loved. The rest had to go.
So the deep cleanse began, and what an eye opener it's been.
One of the biggest lessons I learnt is objects don't hold memories, we do. That's not to say I don't have precious and important items that I haven't kept, I've just tamed down the volume and re-evaluated what's important and precious. For example keeping every birthday, engagement, wedding, baby card is, when you see them altogether piled high, completely unnecessary. Little did I know I had a small forest living in my flat. I know all our family and friends love, support and celebrate big life occasions with us, I don't need cards after the fact to remind me off that. So I picked out a few as keepsakes and the rest went off to be recycled.
I felt pretty grossed out by how much we'd accumulated over the years, that recycling and donating felt good and I can't tell you how freeing it was. I swore never to hoard again. When we finally moved into our new home I joked that we would barely have anything to put in it, especially as our new home was bigger than our last place. I was right, our new home felt super sparse, but after being overwhelmed with belongings it was the most refreshing feeling ever. I didn't want to rush and fill it with unnecessary stuff. I want to fill our home with things we love and need over time. I want the house to grow with us and reflect us as a family and our lifestyle not just become one big, giant Monica cupboard.
Here are some other unexpected and rather lovely benefits to de-cluttering:
- With small children around it makes home life so much easier. Clutter is a temptation. It's something to be played with, pulled out, emptied, chewed on, licked! A cluttered house, can quickly turn into a messy and chaotic house with children. I wish I'd figured that out when Caleb was little.
- Cleaning and tidying is quicker and easier. Dusting used to be my number one hated chore and it would take forever!!!! Now I can have the whole house dusted, hoovered in no time. That brings me serious joy. Who wants to waste their life dusting?!
- I really noticed an overall positive change in my mood at home. I've since come to realise if my home has an overwhelming amount of stuff in it, I feel overwhelmed. Same as when it's overly messy and chaotic, that's exactly how I feel. I guess it's not rocket science but I didn't make the direct correlation until de-cluttering.
- Through figuring out what I truly loved and decided to keep I've found my interior style. Before I was a mish mash of lots of different styles, that I loved individually but didn't particularly flow well together. The pieces I have in our home now compliment rather than compete with each other.
Have I missed or regretted anything we got rid of? Not a single item. In the picture above you'll see the quote, 'Collect memories not things'. After de-cluttering it has kind of been a mantra of mine and a daily reminder to keep my old hoarding ways in check. So far it's worked.
If you've been thinking of de-cluttering your home, do it! Do it now, you won't regret it. You don't need to be moving home to de-clutter. I personally wished I done this years ago.
If you'd like to see more interior pictures of our home and daily life you can find us over on Instagram here.
