You fell in love, but it withered with time like a spent candle’s dissipating smoke.
You had great expectations about it, but it all fell flat.
No, this is not another cheeky Valentine’s Day horror story. This is about your cluttered living room.
When you buy a house for the first time, it seems so spacious. The space at first seems endless since the living areas are mostly empty!
Then you start bringing in your furniture. The space gets a bit diminished, but you don’t mind. There is still a good amount of space left.
A few years later, there is more clutter; often, too much stuff. But you don’t know which ones to toss away and which ones to keep. It seems like there is some furniture or fixture at every second step. However, you’re still not concerned because you still have space.
A few years down the line, things get maddening. You can’t take it anymore because there is just too much clutter. Your living room looks more like a cargo container!
So what happened?
Did your home change?
No, that’s still the same.
What changed is how much furniture you now have now.
As long as we have space at home, we tend to buy things without a plan. We buy furniture randomly on a whim or when required, at the most. But there comes a time when space runs out, and that’s what your problem is now.
So how do you come out of this mess?
There is a very simple thing you can do, and that’s what we’ll show you in this article.
Step one: Take everything off
Take a pen and a paper, and as you go through one room after the next, write down all the things you have. It can be furniture, wall hangings, fixtures, electronic devices, home appliances, and everything else. Don’t leave anything off. If you want to save space, you don’t want to cheat. That’ll defeat the whole purpose of doing this exercise.
Go from room to room, and write down the things there.
Now, ideally, you should take everything outside your home before the next step. Some experts will suggest doing so. Taking things out makes a stronger impression on your mind. You know that this is serious business, and you have to remove some things forever.
However, that isn’t practical. You may not have space outside your home, or maybe you live in a co-op society or in an apartment. So you can’t just take out and dump your things outside.
So here’s a shortcut or cheat code, if you will.
Cross the items on your list which are not essential.
You can’t do without your refrigerator, but you may be able to do without that bookshelf you bought last month.
This is the time to be serious and ruthless. Don’t be too sentimental now if you want to save space. You must throw a few things out.
What’s the next step once you are done with crossing stuff out on your notepad?
Step two: Put things back
Yes, put things back in place.
But not all of them!
You want to save space and throw out unnecessary stuff as we said above. So, keep only the essential ones. And the ones that are not essential, you know what you need to do with them.
Umm, no…you don’t have to throw them away necessarily.
You can:
- Sell them off at a yard sale
- Sell them off to a furniture store that accepts old items
- Give them away as a charity and the like.
By the end of these two steps, you’ll have the much-needed space in your home.
As you have seen, these steps are simple, so don’t try to do more than this; it may complicate things. Please do not procrastinate and don’t get too emotional over things that are not essential. You’ll thank yourself at the end of the day and fall in love once more… with the same home!
