We all experience the urge to declutter every few months. It’s like an alarm that goes off in your brain when there’s too much clutter in your house. You know that decluttering is your best bet when it becomes difficult to walk around in your house without hitting random objects of clutter. And it feels like a huge win once you’ve cleared the clutter out of your home so much so that you feel motivated to do it more often.
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Decluttering, whenever it happens, takes away a good 5% of all the clutter in my home, if not more. This percentage can be more if it has been too long since I last decluttered but it still barely goes beyond 10%. This percentage can differ from person to person depending on what their decluttering goals are. For those who are downsizing or moving to a smaller place, it can be 20 or 30 or more. And for people who don’t have much clutter to begin with, it can be as low as just 1 or 2 percent.
But how exactly do you declutter if half your house is stuffed with clutter?
You may have a clear idea of how much clutter you have been hiding under and even have the willingness to let go, but how do you start decluttering your living space when clutter overpowers the stuff that you actually need?
Well, that’s exactly when reverse decluttering comes into play.
Reverse decluttering is slightly different from the regular methods of decluttering in the sense that it requires you to give a home to every important object in your house and then get rid of the ones that remain. It works around the idea that if you can’t assign a home to an object, it simply means that you don’t find it worthy enough to get a place in your home.
Here’s what you can do to clear the clutter in your house with reverse decluttering:
Method 1: Remove Items Before Putting Them Back
Assuming that every drawer or cupboard in your house is overly cluttered, the best way to go is to remove all the items and start putting them back one by one. But before you do that, make sure that you don’t empty out an entire room but just a small area, like a shelf or a closet.
Once the space has been emptied, grab the items one by one and arrange them back into the closet. Remember that reverse decluttering requires you to only invite back the items that you need and not the ones you can do without. Now that you have kept all the items that you need, it would be easier to sort through the remaining pile of items. You can either donate, trash, sell or give away anything that has been sitting purposelessly in your home.
Method 2: Choose A Number
This method can work wonders if you have too much clutter to deal with and don’t know how to start getting rid of the excess stuff. Here, you pick a closet or a drawer and decide the number of items you want to keep. For instance, if you are looking to declutter the junk drawer in your kitchen, you can choose a number ranging between 10 and 20 before picking the most needed items first. Make sure that you stick to the number but allow yourself the grace to choose a couple more items if needed. Do this for every single drawer or cupboard in your house and soon, you’ll realize that your house is only full of items that you actually need and want.
Method 3: Limit The Space
Just as you can set a limit on the number of items you allow yourself to keep, you can set a limit on the space you allow for a particular category of items in your house. For instance, you can assign a drawer or a box to keep your sentimental items and keep only the ones that can fit into it. Similarly, you can dedicate a cupboard for your kitchen appliances and a filing cabinet for the paperwork.
This method will allow you to choose only the most important items to keep in the limited storage space available and you can later sort through the less important ones to figure out what to do with them.
Method 4: Hold And Decide
If the thought of emptying out the entire drawer or cupboard makes you feel overwhelmed, you can skip that method for the one that needs you to grab individual items before deciding whether to keep it. You can start with a kitchen cupboard or a living room shelf or the bathroom closet. Address each item one by one by holding it in your hand and asking yourself if you truly need it. Here’s a set of questions you must ask yourself to decide whether to keep an item or discard it. Make sure that you have a sorting bin by your side to collect the items that should go.
Method 5: Will You Care If You’d Lost This Item In A House Fire?
If you want to figure out which items to keep, the easiest way is to ask yourself a simple question – Which items would I grab first if my house was to catch a fire? Prepare a list of items you really care about including the ones that are hard to replace. It may be your favourite dress, your childhood pictures, a family heirloom or just a juicer that your mom gifted you. Asking this simple question can help you in figuring out what really matters to you thereby making it easier to let go of what’s not needed.
So there you have it! I hope these reverse decluttering tips help you tackle the clutter in your home in no time.
Have you ever decluttered your home using reverse decluttering? Do you have any additional tips to share? I would love to make this a 2-way conversation so feel free to drop a comment below or write me at hello@theaestheticabode.com.