Clearing out clutter? My top tip to get every room back into shape!

So you’ve just spent the afternoon sorting out your wardrobe, the toy room or a kitchen cupboard – but it just doesn’t look finished. There’s still such a mess to deal with. Sound familiar?

This happens all the time. Organising a space can cause a bit of a mess. After all you are pulling out and rearranging things and not everything will go back to where you found it.

But how do you get the room back in shape after a good clear out?

One of my top tips to anyone attempting to do a spot of organising is to always leave time to tidy up at the end!

If you’ve been organising for a while, you may end up tired after it. If it’s been particularly difficult to de-clutter, looking at a mess at the end could very well leave you feeling totally fed up with it!

Which is why, it’s important that the time you allocate to organising, includes time to clean up at the end.

So for one hour’s work, you might organise for forty minutes and clean-up for twenty. If you do thirty minutes, you could organise for twenty minutes and clear up for ten minutes.

Cleaning up will include:

1. Putting rubbish bags out to the bins and/ or recycling.
2. Placing bags containing donations out to the hallway, or into your car for drop off later.
3. Putting any items that don’t belong in the room or space you are currently organising to where they should belong.

Let’s look closer at point three. Some items that “belong elsewhere” will be straight forward enough. The lego that made it’s way into your underwear drawer, will go back to the toy room. Or the phone bills that are among your baking dishes will go out to the office.

But there will inevitably be smaller items that are without a home. This is what I call ‘decluttering debris’. And the usual list of suspects are:

• Hair clips
• Hair bobbins
• Loose Coins
• Paper clips
• Pens
• Buttons
• Batteries
• Empty cases (CD, DVD, sunglasses, etc.)
• Scraps of paper with telephone numbers on them
• Gardening seeds
• Bits of ribbon and material

You will look at them all and think to yourself that you don’t have a proper home for these things, so what do you do with them?

If you don’t have a proper home for them don’t panic. At this ‘Tidy-Up” stage, take each item, and place them in the ROOM that they belong in. Don’t worry that you have no exact spot or you haven’t bought any storage for it yet. It doesn’t matter.

One thing is for sure, the item in question does not belong where it currently is. So place it where it ‘should’ go. So paperclips in the bathroom, will go to the office. Or gardening seeds in the kitchen will go out to the shed. Or buttons and ribbons might go out to the laundry, or under the stairs.

As you organise around your house, you will come across these items again and THEN you can deal with their organisation and storage. For now, stay focused on the room at hand. Tidy it up and move on!

Happy Organising !