Three Steps to De-cluttering Your Home
Fall is the perfect season to start working towards your minimalist goals.
Just like spring, fall is the perfect season to begin working towards your minimalist goals in preparation for a stress-free home this winter. As my family is preparing to move into our bus, we have begun the process of sorting through our storage room designating things to keep, donate, or sell. We had a garage sale last weekend, where we sold most of our furniture. We donated most of the clothes our kids had grown out of or clothes we didn’t want to keep (read more about minimizing your kids’ wardrobes here.)
De-cluttering is such a satisfying process, but it can be daunting sometimes. I am by no means an expert at this, but here are three steps that may help you work towards simplifying and de-cluttering your home this fall:
1.Begin by Reducing What You Have in Storage
If you’ve had something stored away that you haven’t used or needed for more than three months, consider putting it in your sell or donate piles. Parting from what we have in storage can be difficult. Most people have storage closets, rooms, or even containers full of often unnecessary clutter. These storage rooms can be helpful places to keep seasonal items that you bring out once or a few times a year (like clothes for example), but they are also easy places to accumulate items that you’ll never use again and just can’t get rid of. Personally, I struggle with parting from books and nostalgic items that I only look at every few years like cards, journals, or old photos. Some of this is worth keeping, and I don’t think you have to get rid of everything. (Though, a true minimalist probably would.) Over the years, usually after a move, I have parted with many of these items, and it becomes easier to part with things if you never use them or never have them on display.
2. Put the Never-Used Items Away For Three Months
This applies to clothes, books, decorations, furniture, kitchen supplies, toys, and anything else that you have lying around that never gets used. It may seem extreme, but personally, I always have a pile of something I can go through, books I never read and could give to a friend or sell (I mean do you really need that old text book?), toys that my kids never touch. Books are the hardest for me. I still have too many books, but soon, I plan to get everything that I can in e-book format on Kindle. If you can part with it immediately, do! But if you just can’t throw it away, store it for three months, and start with step one.
3. Open a Seller’s Account on Ebay or Plan a Garage Sale
Once you begin going through your items and sorting them into keep, sell, or donate piles, you may need some help committing to the act of permanently parting from your stuff. Planning a garage sale is one of the best ways to do this. Set a date, advertise it on Craigslist, and say goodbye to your little-used junk. Better yet, begin listing your items on Ebay. At the beginning of this year, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk challenged everyone to making an extra $20,170 by the end of the year by selling stuff on Ebay. He theorized that everyone probably has anywhere from $500 to $5,000 of never used items lying around their home that could be utilized to make some extra cash. Selling stuff you never use to both de-clutter your home and to make some extra money seems like a good motivator to me.
No matter how you choose to de-clutter your home and minimize your belongings this fall, I recommend that you start right away. There’s no better time than the present to start becoming a minimalist!
How do you go about de-cluttering your home in the spring or the fall? We’d love to hear from you!
