Tidying To Sell
Decluttering
Decluttering is not just about cleaning out your junk drawers and throwing out old bathroom products. It’s about completely transforming your life. While it will certainly be helpful to rid your house of clutter when it comes time to sell (and pack), it is most helpful to think of this as a process that is totally about you, your family, and the way each of you connect with your belongings. Keep whatever belongings enrich your life and rid yourself of any extraneous possessions that steal space from your home and your mind. When we keep only that which enriches our lives, we become happier, more open minded, and feel a greater sense of freedom within our living space.
To begin, define for yourself categories for your possessions. It is best to declutter by item category instead of by room so that you are working with items of similar use, value, or size. Some excellent example categories are clothes, kitchen supplies, bathroom products, and linens. Start with a category of items in your home with which you have little to no emotional connection. Those items should be easiest to part with. The items that will be hardest to part with, like pictures and collectibles should be saved for last, as they can take a long time to sort through and may slow you down.
For whichever category you choose to begin with, remove every item out of its storage space and put everything in one pile or area of a room. For instance, If you are working on organizing kitchen supplies, take out all of your kitchen tools and appliances and place them on the counter. Take out all of your spatulas, vegetable peelers, electronic mixers, food processors, bowls, etc.
Next, take your time to study each item and determine whether you are going to keep it, or discard it. Instead of focusing on an item’s use value, try to acknowledge the feeling you get when you would use the item. Does it actively enrich your life? Will you be less happy if you discard it? Will you be regularly and horribly inconvenienced by its absence? Place items you want to keep in one pile and place items you will discard in a separate pile. Be sure to determine what you will do with the item before you put it down, and don’t create a pile for items that you’re unsure about. Remember, you have a whole house to tidy. Going through items twice isn’t going to be helpful. This same process applies to each and every category in your home. It might take a little work to get in tune with your feelings about what you own, but keep at it.
Only you get to determine what you keep. If you relieve yourself of even one possession, you have made progress. However, don’t think to yourself that just because there might be a use for an item someday, that it’s necessary to keep it. If an item doesn’t regularly bring joy to your life, you won’t notice any lack of joy once you get rid of it. And It’s also okay to make mistakes. If you discard an item and later realize you need it, you can always buy it again, or better yet, come up with your own creative solution.
Organizing
After you go through a category and have determined which of your items you’ll be keeping, you must devise a plan to store all of your things in a way that makes sense to you and others that live in your home. Because every space is different, it's best to determine how you will do this yourself. There isn’t one approach that works best, but here are some recommendations for success:
Have a home for every single item you own
Organize items of similar use by size
Keep as many possessions as possible in a closed storage space, out of plain sight
Make sure all items in storage are visible when its storage space is opened
Store frequently used items in a way that is easily accessible
When there are multiples of items, give all the items one home.
Store items you use very infrequently, like winter coats, in less easily accessible places to keep them out of the way, off your mind, and to make more space for your other items.
Because you will be organizing in anticipation of buyers coming to preview your home, we recommend a little more stringent of an approach for the time being. You want your buyers to feel like there is plenty of space in the home, and there is no better way to do that than having all of your belongings tidily tucked away out of sight.