How to Creatively Declutter Your Apartment
Cleaning the apartment: it’s a chore that seldom few actually enjoy doing, yet it’s a necessary evil of having a home. It’s even worse if you’re the type of person who lets things pile up for a while before suddenly realizing it’s time for a decluttering session. While nothing is going to make cleaning out-and-out fun, there are definitely a few creative tricks to make the process a little more bearable.
Race Against the Clock
Even if you don’t have a competitive streak, working on a time limit might help you work more quickly to get things done. Pick a time limit–whether it’s five minutes or an hour–and see how much you can get done in that time. Take a short breather, and then try and beat your progress in your next go-around. Hopefully, you’ll be too busy trying to top your high score to realize you’re actually getting some work done.
Get Philosophical
Decluttering your home and thinking deeply about life don’t seem to go hand-in-hand, but in this case they do. The Marie Kondo philosophy of keeping an organized home has been picking up steam for the past few years, and for many, it’s a way of keeping the home from ever getting messy again. It’s simple, too: all you have to do is ask yourself, “Does this object really make me happy?” If not, get rid of it! Remember, the less things you have around your apartment, the less likely it is that you’ll have a mess on your hands.
Enlist Some Help
Everything’s better with friends, especially the dull tedium of housework. If you’ve got a serious fiasco on your hands, consider reaching out to family or friends for a little help with the work. If Tom Sawyer was able to get his friends to paint a fence, you can get your friends to help you pick up a bit around the home. Better yet, some outsiders may be able to lend a second pair of eyes to give you some fresh perspective on your how you organize your home. Don’t forget to repay your helpers, though – pizza is the standard unit of currency for tasks like these.
Put Everything In Its Right Place
One major cause of messiness is lack of an organizational structure. Simply, if you can’t figure out a good place to put your things, they’ll just end up lost among the rest of the clutter in your apartment. So, give each object you own a home of its own, and every time you’re done with it, put it back where it belongs. It’s a no-brainer concept, but it’s easy to ignore, so use a little creativity to make sure you stick to it. For instance, you can use labels to indicate which drawer is for what, or you can even type up a list of where things should go.
Using some of these techniques, your decluttering work should go by a little easier. Hopefully, you’ll learn something new about how your apartment is organized so you can prevent future messes from occurring, too.