As much as I have put off admitting this over the past few years, it is now time for a declutter at home. Such is the level of decluttering required, it will no doubt be known in the future as ‘The Great Declutter of 2015’ – but it really will be worth it! Naturally, most of the aforementioned clutter belongs to me…I have this ability to keep things ‘just in case –  it’s sure to come in handy’. And inevitably it doesn’t. So now is the time and we are both ready to do this (yes, Tom has his own clutter too – he just pretends that it’s all mine!). 

Lots of things have prompted this decluttering. The main thing is that since we don’t have a garage anymore, we have lots of things that don’t have a proper home. And we can’t do that thing that we used to where we would just chuck stuff in the garage and shut the door quickly (a bit like Monica’s cupboard on Friends!). Either we need it and we keep it and find somewhere to put it, or it goes. This is how ruthless this decluttering will be! Another thing that has prompted it is that we have wanted to build some shelves in our living room for a long time now, and we decided that the two things could go hand in hand. I also had to move my computer downstairs (because the internet signal is really bad upstairs) and we’re going to build a desk into the shelves too. You might be thinking that we could get one of those booster thingies and that would solve that problem, but it’s nicer being down here anyway (except for the temporary home on our old dining table…but it’s not for long!) and it’s helpful too, especially as I do all my making in the kitchen now.

I had a little look online for some decluttering tips – there is quite a lot out there about what is the best way to do things. One post I read said that you shouldn’t have a ‘keep’ pile, and that you should just find a home for the thing straight away instead. I like this idea in principle, but that’s clearly not going to work for us because we haven’t built the home for the things yet! So we’re sticking with the ‘keep’, ‘throw’ and ‘give to charity’ piles for now. I also like this list from Apartment Therapy, which is what not to do when decluttering. Tip number 2 is useful to me – I always try to do more in a short space of time than I can actually achieve! So I need to remember that this isn’t going to be a quick process…we’re not going to be building the shelves until we can take a couple of weeks off at the end of August/beginning of September, so there will be mess and there will be time to plan. Speaking of shelves, if anyone has any tips or can point us in the direction of some, that would be FAB! I’m like ‘yeah, we can build some shelves!’ but Tom is not a DIY fan and we’ve never done anything like this…my Dad has kindly said he will come and help us to construct them, but we need to work out what that actually means…

I have been trying to reorganise my craft supplies a little better so that I’m not forever going up and downstairs for something else that I’ve forgotten. Know that feeling too? I seriously spend so much time doing this – it’s really frustrating! So I decided that something needed to be done about it asap. This included buying one of those super cool raskog trolleys from Ikea (yes, I got the teal one – whoop!) and it has been brilliant. I’m planning on doing a separate post about that soon, so stay tuned. I have already begun to sort out my fabric stash (read more about doing an inventory here), so I feel like progress has been made already. Yay! Wish me luck for the rest…

Do you have any tips for decluttering?