How to Do a Slow Declutter of Your Home and Life

While the Christmas decorations were taken down and packed away before New Year’s Eve, it quickly became obvious that every single room in the house was still in a bit of a mess. Nothing was falling apart and there were no piles of old newspapers or broken coat hangers lurking in corners, but there was clutter. Lots and lots of clutter. 

The Bloke and I are not hoarders in the traditional sense, but we do have a tendency to soothe ourselves with things when we are feeling low: a book here, a small Lego set there, stationery, candles… Over time, those small comforts accumulate, and suddenly drawers are full and surfaces are much busier than they should be.

How to do a slow declutter of your home and life, with tips for a more gentle way to clear your space, by removing just five things a day.

Royalty-free Image credit: manbob86 from Pixabay

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50 Things to Remove from Your Home and Your Life

Decluttering and minimalism

Updated 2022: This post contains affiliate links, which means I receive a small amount of money if you make a purchase from any of the Amazon links included

I’m a hoarder. It’s one of the first things I talked about when I started blogging all those years ago – I like to keep everything for so many reasons: future crafty projects like scrapbooks, saving memories and often as a ‘just in case.’ After moving house several times in the last four years, it became evident that I had amassed more than I ever wanted or needed, so I have embarked on a self-styled project in recent months to rid my house (and my life) of unnecessary items that took up much needed space.

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Before I started, I gave myself a one year rule: anything that I hadn’t read, listen to, worn or looked at had to go. I then decided on three categories for the physical items: rubbish and recycling, charity and sale-worthy.

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A Temporary Domestic Goddess

imageCleaning is something I have always been bad at. It isn’t that I can’t or don’t know how to do it – I was taught how to cook, clean and sew from an early age – it’s simply that I don’t want to. Well, that isn’t totally true – I keep myself, the cats and my clothes clean, but when it comes to daily organisation I am distinctly lethargic.

I’ve always been this way. I think it stems from watching my mother obsessively clean the house on a daily basis – she was desperately unhappy for most of our childhood, using cleaning as a way of having some sort of control in our household, and would often spend her cleaning sessions shouting at us to do various chores, which she would then do inevitably again after we had finished because we hadn’t done it properly. Cleaning was always a negative experience, and this mentality has followed me into adulthood. Continue reading