Declutter for summer!

Summer is almost here and now is the time to get your house in order! The warmer days and lighter evenings seem to energise and inspire many of us to get on with all those little jobs we keep meaning to do – then rewarding ourselves with a nice cool drink afterwards!   It’s often at this time of year that we feel able to face larger jobs too, such as decorating, DIY or other forms of home improvement.

One of the best things you can do over the summer that will truly make a lasting impression on your home is to have a major declutter.  Nowhere is this more true than in the bedroom!  However beautifully we paint our walls and perhaps find new wardrobe solutions that we love, the impact will then be lost if we just move all the old clutter back in again.

Have a browse through our gallery of pictures of contemporary fitted bedrooms.  The rooms pictured are all neat and decluttered – as indeed you would expect from commercial photographs.  But just think how lovely it would be to actually live like that.   We can all immediately start to voice many reasons why that is not possible but perhaps, on reflection, it is?

A very popular book at the moment is Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.  The book claims to be “a simple, effective way to banish clutter forever “ and one of its main messages is that if you properly declutter your home once, you’ll never have to do it again.   Do you really want or need everything that you currently own?  Or to put it another way:  “Is it propelling you forward or holding you in the past?”

If you are thinking about a bedroom makeover this summer then it does indeed make sense to declutter before spending time and money on new wardrobe solutions.   How much easier would it be to plan your elegant minimalist bedroom if you didn’t  have so much stuff to fit into it!    If you don’t feel able to follow Marie Kondo’s methods completely then why not try DIY Homefit’s Seven Steps to a quick and easy declutter:

1. Go through your wardrobe and drawers and put everything that you do not use into black bags.  Be ruthless!  Anything that you have not worn for a while, or that doesn’t fit,  or that you’ve never really liked but felt you should keep …. all of these need to go into one of those bags.
2. Move the bags into another room for now.  We will deal with them later!
3. Clean the insides of the wardrobe and drawers so they are nice and fresh and free of dust (and livestock!).
4. Reorganise the items that are left into a logical order.  Some people like to colour code things, others to put similar types of garments together.  The choice is yours.
5. Take a break of a week or two and see how much nicer the decluttered storage area is.
6. When you feel ready check through the bags, just in case there is anything you have been too ruthless about and need to reprieve.  There most probably won’t be!   
7. All that remains is for the bags now to leave your home.  You may want to sort them into items to sell (eg eBay or car boot sale) and items to give away either to friends or charity shop.  But you will now feel much better when they have gone!

And that’s it!  If you’ve followed the above plan you should have cleared some much-needed space in your home and can now reward yourself by choosing a stylish new wardrobe solution that works with your new streamlined lifestyle!   Enjoy having a browse then do get in touch with us to place an order and start making your dream bedroom a reality!