Declutter your home in 2020

Perfect storage solutions with custom fitted wardrobes from DIY Homefit

According to recent research by YouGov, 27% of us in the UK were planning to make New Year resolutions for 2020. But what do people actually resolve to change? The most common resolutions are – predictably – related to health, diet and fitness. But 11% of people have also included improving their homes in New Year’s resolutions either this year or in previous years.

At DIY Homefit our passion is for home improvement, and we hope that we will be able to help you do just that sometime during 2020. We have a wonderful range of storage solutions for kitchens and bedrooms – including bespoke sizes and custom fitted wardrobes – that can completely transform the look and feel of your home.

But in parallel with this, what many of us need to do is to declutter our homes. This can be particularly apparent after the Christmas season: the combination of more stuff coming into the house, taking down the Christmas decorations, and the general debris from a lovely time of  “eat, drink and be merry” can leave us wondering where on earth to put everything!

So why not get 2020 off to the best of starts by having a major declutter, then keep the impetus going throughout the year?

January can feel like a long dreary month, so it’s a good idea to spend the time productively and focus on decluttering. You will then be ready for all those home improvements you are going to make once the days start getting longer and lighter. 

Here is our simple Five Point Plan to declutter your home:

• Make a plan

First make a list of categories of items to declutter. Then make a plan of when you are going to tackle each one. Don’t be too ambitious; perhaps focus on just one or two categories each week/weekend. Suggested categories could be clothes / books / childrens’ toys / CDs and DVDs / kitchen equipment etc. Even the act of making a plan will help you to start feeling more positive.

• Work through your plan

For each category look through every item and be absolutely ruthless. Back in the 19th century, the artist and author William Morris famously said “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”  That sentiment has been resurrected recently by Marie Kondo, the well-known Japanese organising consultant and author, who encourages us to keep only things that “spark joy”.

So unless you either use something regularly or really love it – out it goes!

• Reorganise

Once you have decided on the items that have to go, you should hopefully be left with a lot more storage space for your remaining items. Now is a good opportunity to reorganise where things go, and ensure that they are stored in a more logical order than before so that they are easier to find. It is worth spending a bit of time on doing this well, as it will then make future decluttering easier to do.

• Recycle

Give careful thought as to what to do with the things that you are getting rid of. Sadly some will inevitably end up in landfill but it’s good – and environmentally responsible – to avoid that wherever possible. So try some of these ideas for disposing of unwanted items:

• Charity shops
• Donation websites (eg Freecycle)
• Sell online (eg eBay or Facebook Marketplace)
• Car boot sale
• Give away or sell locally (eg ads in local papers or noticeboards)

• Mop up

Even when you have worked through all the categories on your list, there are bound to be areas of the home that still need decluttering. Typical examples are kitchen drawers, understairs cupboards, lofts and garages. Don’t panic, just take one area at a time. You may well find things that you want to keep that it would be better to move elsewhere for easier access: and with the reorganisation you have already been doing this will hopefully now be quite straightforward.

The above tips should help you to get your decluttering off to a great start this January, and enable you to keep it up throughout the year. You will then have a more level playing field, ready to start improving your home and making it more into your ideal home in 2020. 

Check back here soon for more home and lifestyle tips from DIY Homefit.