Decluttering your home helps decluttering your mind. The Universe likes symbolic gestures, you’ll find that if you keep your surroundings tidy, you obtain a clearer mind and a feeling of confidence.
Our homes are full of stuff that, let’s be honest, doesn’t belong there. If you care about the environment and want others to regard you as a green person (not literally, I hope) these decluttering tips will come in handy.
- Remove the main sources of clutter. Stop bringing useless stuff home and you’ll have less junk and more space to relax and be with your family. TV ads suggest that we buy this and buy that. The question is if we really need this and that. Our ancestors had very little stuff and you couldn’t really call them unhappy. People knew how to smile and enjoy themselves. Do we know actually enjoy ourselves amidst the heeps of stuff?
- Discover the magic of Freegle (it is a Yahoo mailing group that you can sign up to) and local council recycle centres. If there’s something that you don’t use, stick it on Freegle or if you don’t like the idea of giving something away, advertise it on Gumtree or sell it on Ebay.
- If you didn’t use it in the last 6 months, chances are you won’t need it in the next 6 months. Open your warderobes and cupboards and look for those things.
- Think about paper. Can you go paperless? It takes 18 mature trees to produce one metric ton of paper. You alone are responsible for bringing 2 mature trees down. Subscribe to your favourite newspaper’s digital edition and stop receiving the paper copies. Ask your energy/service providers to stop sending you paper bills and useless sales letters. Who’s the most notorious where you live? In my part of the woods it is Virgin Media and Southern Electric. The former keeps sending me informal letters with useless instructions on how to switch on my home hub and when it came to delivering my cable box, it arrived in a huge box that would be good enough to fit in an elephant. #fail!
- Get rid of old appliances and replace them with A+ (fridges, washing machines) or Energy Star (computers, monitors). Make sure you recycle your old appliances. There are many services that will come and collect your unwanted stuff, your local council is one of them. I always take my stuff to my local recycling centre (also run by the council, just phone them or check their website to find out where is your closest centre).
I won’t bore you with feng-shui stuff that teaches you how to arrange things in your house (simply because I don’t know much about it) but it’s not really important. Keep it simple, clean it up and make decluttering a big and noisy family event. It’s great fun!!!
Pic by EvelynGiggles, Creative Commons
