Maybe you see beautiful, clutter-free spaces in magazines or on the web, and think: my home could never look like that. But it can! Freeing your space — and your life — from overwhelmingly huge amounts of stuff doesn’t take superhuman effort. All you need is a little commitment to some basic principles.
1. Live within your means.
This is an idea I got from one of our Apartment Therapy videos, and I think it’s a wonderful place to start if you’re aiming for a simpler, less cluttered life. What ‘live within your means’ means for your home is this: let the size of your home dictate how much stuff you have, and not the other way around. If your closet is bursting at the seams, instead of dreaming of a bigger closet, why not try paring down your clothes to fit the space you have?
→ One Minute Tip: Live Within Your Means
2. Purge often.
Even if you get to a point where you have only as many things as will comfortably fit into your space, stuff has a way of accumulating. So set aside a time, a few times a year, to go through your things and get rid of the ones you don’t use anymore. You’ll feel so much lighter, and your home will thank you.
→ Let It Go: How To Let Yourself Finally Get Rid of Things
3. Have a place for everything.
‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ Almost a cliche, but still some of the best organizing advice out there. A bit of further advice: if you have lots of things in limbo on tables or countertops or the floor and are struggling to find places for them, maybe you need more places. This is where clear plastic shoeboxes or a filing cabinet or maybe just a console with lots and lots of drawers can come in handy.
→ Small Space Solutions: The Smartest Ways to Stash Your Stuff
4. But don’t underestimate the importance of a junk drawer.
Every household has those little things — pens, tape, twist ties, whatnot — that get used a lot but don’t really have any logical place to go. Instead of agonizing over finding a home for every little thing, keep a junk drawer. The last few little bits of clutter get swept in there, and you’re done.
→ One Minute Tip: Embrace Your Junk (Drawer!)
5. Become a habitual putter-awayer.
This is probably the hardest part of this whole list for me: the ‘and everything in its place’ part of #3. I try to tell myself that it’s a sort of game, kinda like one of these for adults. Put the bottle opener back in the drawer! Hang that skirt you didn’t wear back in the closet! But ultimately, I think the easiest way to make sure you put things away is just to do it, and then keep on doing it until it’s so habitual that you wouldn’t ever think of not doing it. When you see how much better your home looks, you’ll be that much more motivated to keep fighting the good fight.
6. Store things where you use them.
Be smart about where you store things. Not having to walk halfway across your home to put things away will make #5 that much easier.
→ One Minute Tip: Store Things Where You Use Them
7. Stop clutter before it enters your home with a landing strip.
Even if you’re conscientious about what you buy, it’s easy for clutter to sneak its way into your home in the form of junk mail, freebies, what have you. That’s why setting up a landing strip by the front door is so brilliant: because clutter has to come into your home somewhere, and you can stop it right at the source.
→ One Minute Tip: Create a Basic Landing Strip
8. Go paper-free.
Scanning all the documents you’ve been hanging onto may seem like a daunting task, but once you’re done, they’ll be easily searchable (plenty of apps, like Evernote, allow you to search scanned documents for certain words) and you’ll have that much less stuff to manage.
→ One Minute Tip: How to Paper-Free Your Desk
9. Realize that life is about experiences, not things.
We’re constantly being bombarded with advertisements that try to convince us that a happy life is all about having the latest stuff: a new car, an outdoor kitchen, an ice cream maker. But studies have shown, over and over (and my own experience has borne out) that it isn’t the things in our lives that make us happy: it’s our experiences that we treasure most. So the next time you’re tempted to buy more stuff, ask yourself if the money wouldn’t be better spent on a vacation or a nice night out. Bonus: you won’t have to find a space for these things in your cabinets.
10. Forgive yourself and try again.
Remember that nobody is perfect, and nobody’s home is perfect. Even the homes you see in the magazines aren’t perfect — it took a whole team of stylists to make them that way. So if you have an off week, or two weeks, or month, and suddenly your house is a disaster, don’t panic. It’s never too late to forgive yourself and try again.
(Image credits: Nancy Mitchell; Shay Spaniola; Abby Cook; Leela Cyd; Pablo Enriquez)
