14 tips for decluttering your home this summer

1.Save Money: Decluttering helps you avoid buying duplicates of items you already own and ensures you can find and use items before they expire or degrade.

2. Understand the Difference: Decluttering is distinct from organising or cleaning. That’s the big mistake that people make -- trying to do all three at the same time – and end up thoroughly overwhelmed.

3. Start with Easy Decisions: Begin with items that are less sentimental. If clothing or kids’ toys are difficult for you, consider starting with paperwork or non-sentimental areas first.

4. Clutter Doesn’t Mean You’re Lazy: There are genuine reasons why we do or don't do what we do. What we think is laziness is about task initiation and that feeling of paralysis -- just not knowing where to start. And then you get this really negative feeling because of this sort of social shame because if you don't force yourself to do hard things, you're a bad person.

5. Avoid the "DOOM Drawer": Didn't Organize, Only Moved. Simply moving items around without organising them can create clutter hotspots, like a kitchen bench that collects random items – business cards, hair ties, coins, batteries -- they end up in designated bowls and then dumped into a junk drawer to try and manage the chaos.

6. Declutter Before Moving: Declutter BEFORE your move. Because you will not declutter after you've moved. Many people end up with boxes of unexamined items for years, or even decades. They end up at op shops around town for the rest of us to find.

7. Categorise Items: Group similar items together to make the decluttering process easier. For example, gather all hats in one box and then sort them into categories like sun hats and beanies, making decisions simpler.

8. Use Five Boxes: Have designated boxes for different purposes: donate, trash, return to others, keep, and undecided.

9. Share the Task: Decluttering is such a mammoth task, and it doesn't get fairly distributed between members of the household. Some people just don't see it, either they have a higher tolerance to chaos, or they don’t carry the household mental load.

10. Prioritise Purposeful Items: Assess whether each item serves a purpose in your life. Determine what you use frequently versus what you only use occasionally.

11. Let Go of Unwanted Gifts: Don’t feel obligated to keep gifts that don’t resonate with you. And that applies to family heirlooms too. “You don’t use your grandmother's dinner set and it's big to store. So maybe keep one little bowl. You can honour this entire thing by keeping a smaller part of it.

12. Label Everything: Labels serve as instructions for everyone in the household. You might know where the thing is or what lives in that box, but not everybody does. “Where's the Christmas card decoration crap? It's in the box with Christmas card decoration crap written on it.”

13. Dispose of Unidentified Items: Don’t hold onto things just because you’re unsure how to get rid of them or don’t know what they are. E-waste is a modern issue; many cables are obsolete or broken and will never be reunited with their device.

14. Don’t Keep Expensive Stuff Because Of Guilt: If the telescope, rowing machine or kayak was expensive but no longer gets any use, consider reselling it on Trade Me instead of letting it take up space and guilt trip you.

If you need help, contact Carrie at Curate Home. She’ll sort you out.