Decluttering is an essential home maintenance task that is often overlooked, and while it can be a difficult task, it is rewarding. Decluttering your home creates a more organized and functional space. It even affects your mental health, reducing stress and enhancing productivity.
Decluttering your home can be challenging because it is time-consuming and often involves letting go of some valuable properties. This article highlights four effective methods that simplify decluttering to keep your home fresh and inviting.
Table of Contents
The One In, One Out Method
This is a special method that prevents your home from accumulating clutter. It is best used after a decluttering exercise or after moving into a new home. The one-in, one-out method removes one like-for-like item for every new item you bring home.
Removing as you add ensures that your clutter does not build up, eliminating the need for decluttering in the future. Decluttering is one of the essentials in every checklist for move, but the one-in, one-out method ensures that there is no clutter in the house, no matter how long you’ve lived there.
The Four-Box Method
The four-box method is one of the most efficient ways to declutter your home without sacrificing valuable property or resources. It involves sorting your things into four labeled boxes and placing them appropriately. While there are several variations of the box label, a standard label of the boxes would include:
- Keep
- Donate or sell
- Discard or trash
- Storage
For the keep box, you place items you actively use and want to keep. The donate or sell box gathers items you don’t want to keep but are still usable. A trash box collects items that are damaged and non-functional. The storage box holds items you want to keep but only use seasonally.
Using this method, you simply go through your resources and place items into one of your boxes. Finally, take the storage box to a storage location like a garage or attic and reserve the keep box in your living space. You can then discard items in the donate and trash boxes appropriately.
The KonMari Method
This is another popular decluttering method, also called the category-based method. It is very efficient for decluttering and maintaining your entire house or living space. This simple method allows for only two options: keep or discard.
It is a systematic method that involves sorting your home items by category, including clothes, books, paper, miscellaneous items, and sentimental items. While you can start from any category, it helps to follow this order as the difficulty increases with each category.
As outlined by the founder of this method, Marie Kondo, the decision to keep or discard should be based on whether the item ‘sparks joy’ in you. Based on her principle, items that bring you joy still serve a purpose, unlike those that don’t.
The Ski Slope Method
The ski slope method of decluttering recommends splitting your room into smaller, manageable sections to handle one after another. It involves working through your room from side to side, like traversing a ski slope.
This method simplifies decluttering because instead of seeing a cluttered room as one big and overwhelming project, you divide it into smaller, more manageable zones. While using this method, pay attention to centralized sections as you move from side to side to ensure you don’t miss any section.
Endnote
Decluttering is important for keeping your home fresh and inviting and improving your mental health and productivity. You can simplify decluttering with efficient methods like the Four-Box, KonMari, Ski Slope, and One-In, One-Out methods.