Decluttering Magic | Simple Decluttering TIPS for an organised Home

Decluttering Magic | Simple Decluttering TIPS for a Welcoming Home

Today let's chat decluttering! I know you all LOVE these tips to help keep your homes in order. Pop this on as you fold your laundry and pick up soem tips to get decluttering.

Here are my top tips:

Be consistent with habit stacking small steps on top of your current routines. Adding a 5-10 minute timer for a morning and evening refresh to quickly tidy up. Choose your space and go for it.

One in, one out! Every time you buy something new, get rid of the old. Sell it or throw it out if its broken or too old.

Declutter by one topic instead of by room. For example, declutter and organise your paper and files, your clothes, kids toys etc.

One touch system. As soon as you get your laundry out of the wash, hang it out straight away or delegate to the kids. Put your dishes straight in top the dishwasher as soon as you've used them. Open the mail and file it straight away. Do things as you go.

Designated areas for everything. Washing baskets, filing systems, hooks for bags, shoe racks etc.

Remember your mindset! Maintaining a tidy home isn't just about the physical, it's about a mindset where you value minimalism. What adds value, what do you use daily? Let go of what you do not need.

Enjoy lovelies, chat soon x

Transcript

Today we're diving into a topic that I know so many of you will appreciate, decluttering. I know we all want a tidy home, but I also know that none of us have time to spend all day cleaning, even me. And I actually love cleaning and I find that therapeutic. I don't even have time to spend hours cleaning, you know what I mean? Because we're all busy, we all have other things to do. So today I wanted to share with you some practical tips and hacks, as always, to help you maintain a clutter free and minimal home. Really easy and simply. First things first, I wanted to talk about the power of daily habits. I've spoken about habit stacking before in more of a self love, self care way. But today let's stick to little daily habits that can help with you keep your home tidy. It just makes it so much easier when you can incorporate little small, consistent habits onto a routine that you already do. I personally find it helps to take out the overwhelm of everything getting really chaotic and out of control in terms of mess. It just helps me do little pockets here and there and really keep on top of it. I do think it takes consistency above all. And sometimes I feel like I'm the little cleaning fairy that follows my children around twenty four, seven and husband, mind you. But if, if you don't mind doing that, and if you think about it in terms of time, like maybe you're just following everyone around, doing a few minutes here, a few minutes there. You know, by the end of the day when everyone's in bed, you can sit down and kind of take a breath and it doesn't feel like this huge overwhelm. Recently I have been doing a five to ten minute morning refresh. I think I mentioned this before where I just dedicate five minutes before I leave the house, or ten depending on how I'm going, just to quickly tidy up. So I'll choose a space. It might be the living room, it might be the kitchen. I may be able to do both. I'll set the timer for five to ten minutes and just focus on that one area, and you would really be surprised at how much you can accomplish in that shorter time. My kids generally get up about seven. We leave the house about 8820. So there's not that much time for there to be a huge amount of mess to be created. It's normally just me quickly cleaning up the breakfast, cleaning up the living room where they've been playing with some toys or whatever, and then zooming out the door. You can actually, it depends your living situation. But in my mind, I'm like, it takes the kids five minutes at least to head down the stairs, open the garage door, go into the garage, put their shoes and socks on, climb into the car, put their seatbelts on. You know, someone always forgets something. It takes five or ten minutes for them to do that. And I'm lucky enough that my kids are now old enough that they can do that on their own. Except for Chloe, I still have to go down and buckle her seat in. But in that five or ten minutes, that is when I quickly zoom around, because I know that they're heading down to the garage, they're not in the space, and I can quickly get that done. Another thing I like to think about is one in, one out. My mum actually taught me this. She consistently says it, that every time she buys something new, she'll get rid of the thing that she's replacing. So really keep on top of that. Like, if you've bought new cushions for your lounge, make sure you get rid of the old ones. Or, you know, sell them on Facebook marketplace. If you've bought a new drink bottle, is it because your old one was broken and it's time to get rid of that one? Having this mindset and doing this is really going to help prevent clutter and accumulating heaps and heaps of things over time. One thing where I find this happens is with, like, the kids dinnerware, things like that. So if you have little kids, I'm thankfully starting to move out of it. But if you have little kids and you have like, bottles, sippy cups, bowls, plates, all of those things, you just generally start to accumulate them. Especially because people give it to you for like, Easter. You get those little sets with the Easter eggs and whatever, accumulate a million drink bottles. One lid might be broken. And if you're like me, you just keep it and it gets like, too much and it takes up so much space. You have like a whole drawer dedicated just to drink bottles, which is ridiculous. So just make sure you stay on top of. If one new one comes in, put one old one out, either sell it if it's still in good condition, chuck it if it's broken. You get what I mean? And off the back of the morning, little reset. I always like to do an evening reset, so spend a few minutes each evening putting things back in their place. This could be something like folding blankets, putting away toys, or clearing the kitchen countertop. Waking up in the morning to a tidy home is a game changer. It sets a positive tone for the day. And seriously, you will thank you. It's like looking after you. You will thank you. You will thank your past self when you're doing it the night before. It's like you're looking after your future self. Next. I wanted to talk about a new strategy that I've recently come across, which is actually decluttering by category instead of room. In my home reset mini series, I spoke about decluttering, and we were doing it room by room, which I still think works really well. But you might have heard about this before, but it's new to me. But this approach, instead of doing room by room, gets you to think about the full picture of a certain group of things, rather than a little bit here, a little bit there. At the moment, I'm on a mission to declutter and organize all the files and paper. And this came about because I was putting in Zara's enrolment for her high school, and I had to find her last two report cards, her NAPLAN results, her birth certificate, you know, all of those type of things. And they were just all over the place. Like, I just had never. I have never really set up a filing system in this new house. And I knew in my mind I had, like, heaps of opened mail downstairs, and I. I had some files in the. In tray in the study, and then I had some things shoved in a drawer here. You know what I mean? So by focusing on all the paper and all of the files at once, it's kind of a job. It's a job that I'm focusing on. So what I've done so far is find all of those little pockets in my house where I've got little things here, little things. They're stored, and I've brought it all together in my study. And I'm on a mission to get rid of all the files and paper that I no longer need and organize everything into a better system. Some ideas to get started with this way of decluttering for you might be looking at your clothes as a topic rather than your wardrobe, because if you're like me, your wardrobe houses a lot of things, not just clothes. So if you go to your wardrobe thinking I'm going to declutter my wardrobe, it can feel a little bit more overwhelming. So in this instance, you would just focus on your clothes, sorting through your clothes, keeping only what you truly love and wear regularly, and donating and recycling the rest. Kids toys is another one. Collect all the kids toys from all around the house, put them in one place, and try and declutter this way. This is a huge job for me because I have three kids and the accumulation of toys is ridiculous. We don't buy the kids that many toys, but over the time, the amount of gifts and things that come through for birthdays and christmases, it's just crazy. So this is one that is on the top of my list. I want to do like a huge declutter of the toys and I'm just going to pile all the toys in one place because then what I can do is I'll be able to see, like what toys I can pass down from Zara and Adrian to Chloe what things we've grown out of and we can get rid of altogether. So I think just having that subject matter as like an umbrella will help you focus on that task. Files and paper is another one. Like I said, that's what I'm doing at the moment. And junk drawers is another one. So if you like me again, you've got random junk drawers around the house. So like, I've got a junk drawer in the kitchen. I've got a junk. You probably, you might have a junk drawer at the front of your house. Just combine all the junk into like one big box and just dedicate like half an hour to going through it and getting rid of stuff. Another great tip that really helps you keep on top of things as you're going is the one touch rule. So this means only handling items once instead of moving them from place to place. So I do love, and I'm going to talk about this later on in the episode by having like a basket where it's just like an everything basket in the kitchen. Because reality is, things just end up getting dumped there. But thinking about this one touch rule, like mail and paperwork, when you get the mail, open it and sort through it straight away. Throw out what you don't need, file the things that you can file, and then maybe have a tray to put in for like urgent bills or letters or I things that you need to action tonight or tomorrow. Laundry is another one where this works. Instead of moving clean clothes around the house. So maybe you're taking them out of the dryer and putting them on the bench, and then you're coming into laundry and going, oh, my gosh, this is so overwhelming. I'm going to move them to the dining table, and then you need to have dinner and you've got all these clothes on the dining table and you put them back in the laundry. Instead of doing that, try and just do as you go. As soon as you get a load out of the laundry, try and fold it up and put it away straight away. If you've got kids who are at an age where they can start to help, give them that job. If you're cooking dinner and you know that a load of laundry has just finished, say to the kids, okay, it's your job now to fold up the laundry that's in the dryer and put that away while I make dinner dishes is another one. Instead of letting dirty dishes pile up in your sink over the day, especially on a weekend, make sure you load them straight into the dishwasher as soon as you've used them. Or wash up pans and things straight away. Seriously, it only takes like, a few minutes. I like to have those, like, dishmatic dish sponges because it just helps me quickly wash it instead of doing the old school way of, like, filling up the whole sink, washing everything. I know that this is a water saving hack, too, but you don't need to fill up the whole sink. I like to turn my tap on really hot, put some dish soap in my pan. If I've cooked eggs or something, turn the water off quickly, like, wash it with the dish soap, rinse it, and then put it on the tray to dry and then put it away. Like, if you can just quickly do these things as you go, it will prevent there being a huge mess of dishes that you have to tackle later on. Something else that I find really helpful is making sure that everything has, like, a designated area. This does take a lot of organization, and maybe it's something where you can just write down a list of things that you really want to organize. Similarly to how I want to set up a different system for my files. But if you've got spaces where certain things can go, and then you can really keep on top of how you use these spaces and teach your kids to use them as well, it can be really helpful. So, for example, having a dedicated, like, mud room or entryway or place like bag hooks to put the bags from school, even if it's in your garage, this really helps you might have like a basket to chuck the shoes in or somewhere where they can go. They know, they hang their bags up, they take their lunchboxes out. And that's just part of their getting home routine. The kitchen basket that I mentioned before, this is like the kitchen random basket. It's really good idea to have a basket to just chuck all of the random stuff that gets put on the bench into this basket. So then when you come to the end of the day, when you're doing your little reset refresh at night, you can just grab this basket and put everything in the place where it needs to be. In terms of bedrooms, I like to have places where everything goes. So everyone has a little bin in their room hidden away, like under a deck desk or in the corner. So rubbish gets put in the bins and obviously you empty them once a week. I like to have laundry baskets everywhere, so clothes aren't just lying around on the floor. And this is something that we teach the kids. Like, we're always saying, take off your clothes and put them in the laundry basket. And you know, sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't. But I think if you just keep trying to teach them these little things, then it definitely helps. I also like to have little trays. Like, I've got a little tray next to my bed where I put like my hair ties when I take them out overnight. Or have like earplugs in there. In the bathroom, I've got a little tray where I put all my jewelry on. So it's just finding little spots and little spaces where things can go that sometimes they might end up just sort of all over the place, floating around and getting lost. Sometimes all you need is a quick decluttering session to really get back on track. My favourite thing to do in terms of cleaning and decluttering is setting a timer. I literally set a timer for like 20 minutes. I'll find a podcast that goes for 20 minutes. I'll put that on. Or if the kids are home and I need to do, do like a little ten minute refresh, I'll put that cleanup song on. If you're a mum, you know what I'm talking about. And we all just go for it for ten minutes. It really helps. Short bursts of decluttering and cleaning can actually be really effective because they're just less overwhelming. Like, it's not. I think in as a mindset thing, you're not saying, I'm going to be cleaning for hours. This is going to be so mundane and boring. It's like, I'm going to be cleaning for ten or 20 minutes. I can do this. It'll just be done before I know it. It's almost like when, you know, you have minimal time, you get more done and you're more ruthless. So that is just the biggest hack set small timers. And the last thing I want to talk about is the importance of your mindset. Maintaining a tidy home is not only about all of the physical things that you do, but it's also about adopting a mindset where you really value simplicity and minimalism. I had this big shift probably when we were moving to London because we knew that we were moving from an apartment to an even smaller apartment. And I started to declutter once, you know, we knew that we were moving because we had, you know, six months to get used to the idea. And really focusing on minimalism helped focus on what truly adds value to your life. What do you use day to day? And this can be across kids toys and clothes and kitchen appliances and dinnerware and cups and, you know, everything. So really just let go of the stuff that you do not need. Less stuff means there's less clean and less to maintain. Always be intentional about new items. So before purchasing anything new. This is huge. With clothes, ask yourself if it's truly necessary, if it works in with your wardrobe, if there's something else that you've got, got exactly the same, you don't need it. Where will it fit into your home? How does it fit in with your style? You know, in terms of kitchen appliances, do you really need it? Is there another appliance that you can use that works the same way? Things like that? And of course, practicing gratitude, appreciating the items that you already have, taking care of them. This is a huge one. Instead of buying cheap things and just replacing it every few months, because it's just, it's such a waste trying to invest in better quality things that will last for five or ten years. This really helps reduce the desire to keep getting more and more and more, and it helps keep that clutter at bay as well. So there you have it, my friends. Decluttering magic to help you have a tidy home without spending all your day cleaning. I hope that you picked up some tips here. Just remember that small daily habits and a mindful approach can really make such a huge difference. Just start with one or two of these tips as usual, and see how you can transform your mind and your space when it comes to cleaning and decluttering.