Is your home full of clutter? Then, it’s time to think of decluttering because the state of our home impacts our thoughts, emotions, stress levels, relationships, and health. When the home is filled with clutter, it can be quite stressful. Decluttering a place changes the whole experience of the place and makes the place pleasant and useful. Be it a home or an office or a restaurant or a hotel: a clutter-free environment makes it attractive, efficient, and peaceful, infused with lots of positive energy. In this blog, I will share with you 7 steps to declutter your home. When you practice these steps, your home will become a haven of peace.

Before I share with you the steps to declutter, let me first share with you the benefits of decluttering your home.

10 Benefits of decluttering your home

1. A decluttered home radiates joy and peace. The moment you enter your home after a long day at work, you feel refreshed and rejuvenated. Your own sweet home becomes your haven of peace and relaxation.
2. Your quality of life improves. Your relationships, health, well-being improve tremendously, and even an ordinary day feels exciting.
3. You sleep better and peacefully in a decluttered home.
4. One great benefit of decluttering a home is you know your home. Yes, this may sound weird, but many of us don’t know our homes. We don’t know where we keep our files or books or clothes, and we spend hours of time searching for these things in times of need. When we keep home in order, we know where things are when we need them.
5. An orderly home inspires excellence in the people living in the home, and this excellence is reflected in work.
6. Your productivity at home increases because you don’t need to spend your time and resources managing clutter.
7. An orderly home saves money because you know what you have, and you don’t end up buying duplicate things.
8. Your regular house-cleaning task becomes easy and simple because of the orderly nature of your home.
9. Children in an organized home learn the importance of becoming organized in their own lives and appreciate the value of living in an organized way.
10. Your clarity of thinking improves, and you become better at decision making because a cluttered house is a reflection of a cluttered mind.

7-step strategy to declutter your home

Many people think that a home should be decluttered a little bit every day. Although this strategy looks easy and tempting, it does not work. It is not sustainable, and eventually, clutter accumulates. Is there a strategy to declutter a home permanently? Let’s see one such strategy here step-by-step.

Commit yourself to tidy up your home. Decluttering your home is nothing short of a life-transforming exercise. It is one of the most important exercises you can do in your life. Your home is the place that gives you rest and relaxation, rejuvenates you for a new day, nurtures your relationships, keeps you healthy and strong, and it’s the happening place of your life. It reflects you. It’s a place in which you would have invested your life savings and pay a major chunk of your salary as EMI to maintain it. It plays a very key role in shaping your life and deserves your time. It needs a strong commitment from your side that “I will dedicate my time and effort to declutter my home.” So, start decluttering your home only when you can allocate a sufficient amount of time for it, which is worth it.

Have a vision for your home. Before you start decluttering, create a vision about how your home should feel to you and note down the details. You are going to create your home, which is one of the most important aspects of your life, and having a clear picture is very important. Below are some questions that can help you create your vision for your home

How should the furniture of the home look??

Should there be flowers in corners?

Should my home be minimalistic? 

Should the curtains be pink in color?

How should my home feel to me when I step in after a tiring day at the office?

What colors do I want in my home?

Which aromas do I want my home to be filled with?

How do I plan to bring fresh air and sunlight into my home?

Understand your why. Once you have jotted down your clear vision for your home, ask yourself this important question – “Why do I want my home to be this way?” and understand the answers. This step gives you enough strength and inspiration to make your vision a reality.

Start decluttering your home by category and not by location. Don’t start with a particular room like a bedroom or kitchen but start with a particular category of items. You can follow this order for easy and better decluttering – clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous items (like utensils, electronic gadgets, etc.), photographs, and sentimental things.

Finish discarding first before you start organizing things in your home. When you start discarding the objects, focus on what to keep rather than what to discard. Follow the above order for discarding the items. Go to each room of your home and collect the things belonging to the particular category which you want to discard and keep in one place. How do you decide which things to discard? Ask yourself this question : “Does this object bring me joy?” 

Hold each thing you own in your hands and ask yourself whether or not it sparks joy. If your answer is no, then let go of the object. Discard it. If it’s yes, then cherish the object that you decide to keep just as you cherish yourself.  

Let go with gratitude. Once you have collected all the objects of a particular category that you want to discard, thank them before saying goodbye. After all, these objects served you all these years, and they deserve that gratitude. When you let go of these objects with gratitude, they come back to you in a better form.

Organize. Once you are done with removing objects from all categories, organize your home in the way you want and fill it with the aromas, colors, objects which make you joyful.

This is how you can declutter your home. After you declutter your home, whenever you buy new things, question yourself – “Does this object bring me joy?” If your answer is yes, buy it and keep it in the right place. In this way, you can permanently free your home from any kind of clutter, and your home can always be joyful and peaceful. 

We spend a considerable amount of time, money, and effort to own a home. What about the maintenance of our homes? How many of us can say that there is no clutter in my home? Not many, right? Just imagine how it feels to live in such a home where your kitchenware, your furniture, your clothes, your electronic goods, and everything else brings you and your family members joy. Imagine how you feel if your home does not have even a single object which does not bring you joy. Imagine how people feel and think in such homes. What kind of impact can such a home create in this world? When all of us keep our homes joyful and peaceful, we can transform the entire world and make the world a peaceful place.

Enjoy the beautiful exercise of decluttering and create your own unique home. If you observe all the major festivals or rituals handed down to us from our ancestors, decluttering the space around is the first step. Maybe, our ancestors knew centuries ago that the first step of a happy life and a peaceful world is decluttering.

Happy decluttering!