The Self-Care Mom

Have you ever wondered how decluttering improves your life? It stems from having an organized living space. When you focus on minimalist self-care tips, you avoid creating a cluttered house. Discover ways you can maintain a clutter-free home and start improving your life today.

Learning to love your house begins with appreciating the items you have stored in it. When you look at your home as a sanctuary for peace, you avoid cluttering your living space. 

With kids, it can be tough to understand why it’s important to clear clutter in your home. Having a minimalist self-care approach can help improve your life because it pushes you to focus on the items you need in it. 

Once you’ve removed the things you can do without, you begin to reap the rewards of decluttering. Not only is clearing the clutter good for your health, but it’s also therapeutic. 

Imagine yourself walking into an area that feels inviting. Your home welcomes you in with little to no mess. 

This gives you a chance to relax on the couch without thinking about whatever mess was spilled on the floor earlier in the day. 

What Is Decluttering

Removing clutter (a combination of random items) from a given area is how you can define decluttering your space. Although there are organized cluttered areas, you’ll want to start by removing unnecessary items in your home. 

Clutter can be harmful because it can negatively affect your mental and physical health. Having a mess in your home increases your stress levels, and can make you question your happiness. 

Why Is Decluttering Important 

There are many reasons why decluttering is important. Not only for health reasons, but also for the sake of knowing where things are around your home. 

When you know where to find items, you’re at peace in your personal space. It’s important to declutter as often as necessary to maintain your own sanity. 

Having a cluttered home makes it difficult to concentrate as well. When your mind sees clutter, it begins to wander. 

This makes it difficult to concentrate and focus on the bigger picture of things. Oftentimes you’ll find your mind wandering about the next step or what you went to grab from a room. 

In most cases, a messy home can lead to insomnia. Depression often follows the lack of sleep and could potentially create anxiety.  
Organizing your home will help bring joy to your space and mental state. Extreme decluttering is recommended in cases when there’s an excess of items blocking the entrance of your home.

How To Start Decluttering When Feeling Overwhelmed

As time goes on, clutter will begin to eat away at your energy. Slowly, you’ll notice yourself feeling drained and overwhelmed by the mess. 

Some of the things you’ll want to keep in mind when decluttering while feeling overwhelmed is to focus on small accomplishments. For example, if you’re having a hard time getting to your closet, then it’s time to remove the items in front of it. 

Removing this section of clutter will help with accessing your closet space again. That small defeat will give you the boost of energy to continue. 

Simple decluttering rules to keep in mind when organizing your home that include ways to ENGAGE with items in your space: 

• Everything in its place. 
• No place, no need. 
• Give it breathing space. 
• Add storage bins.
• Goodbye, garbage.
• Enjoy moments together. 

With everything in its place, you can focus on items that need a place of their own. This also lets you narrow down on what doesn’t have a place to go, and find where to put the items. 

When items have no place, no need to keep them in your home. It’s best to part ways with things that no longer have a purpose for you. Donating or tossing things out are two options to help you decide what to do with these things. 

As you continue to organize your belongings, it’s best to give it breathing space. This means setting items up with space in between. I call this breathing space because it’s like allowing your eyes to narrow their focus when looking at items. 

This can help with minimizing the look and feel of a shelf. Interior decorators do this to help with organization and when grouping similar items within a home.

Add storage bins to open spaces. This helps cover the items that can appear messy on their own, such as power cords. 

Say goodbye, garbage and make room for the things you need. Removing things that are broken or have no use at all can be therapeutic. 

Make time to remove things in your home as often as possible. This will help you avoid cluttering your home with useless items. 

Learn to enjoy moments together rather than stressing yourself over the mess. As time goes on, it will feel like second nature to remove things in your home as soon as they arrive.

Take the junk mail for instance. It comes in daily, and you’ve learned to spot those from a mile away. 

Once you get the hang of recognizing the things that have no use in your home, you’ll learn to see other parts of your life that need to be reworked on. 

Minimalist Decluttering Checklist

As you begin organizing your space, you’ll notice a number of items you’ve accumulated over the years. With kids, it’s often toys. As a responsible adult, you’ll find yourself saving important papers. 

These items in your home can get out of hand. Focusing on the decluttering rules mentioned earlier, you can get a better handle on decluttering toys and paperwork. 

A simple minimalist decluttering checklist can help with organizing your home. Below are some ideas on how to start your organization project. 

• Toys 
• Wardrobe
• Kitchen cabinets and counters
• Fridge and pantry
• Medicine cabinet
• Beauty products
• Linen closet (bed sheets and towels) 
• Garage
• Paperwork
• Sentimental items

Once you’ve decluttered these 10 suggested spaces, you will get an idea of how to purge your house without feeling overwhelmed.

Toys

Regardless of how many times you tell family and friends no more toys for the kids, there’s a chance someone will still show up to the next birthday celebration with one or two in hand. 

Noisy toys, tiny pieces everywhere — it starts to add up. These minimalist playroom organization ideas are great for you to try with your family.  

Wardrobe 

Organizing your closet space helps with laundry as well. It’s one of my best-kept motherhood hacks. 

When you stop overstocking your closet, you learn to appreciate the clothes you have in it. If you notice yourself struggling to find clothes, then it might be time to rework your closet. 

Removing items that no longer fit you is the best approach. Slowly work your way through clothes that can be donated or sold. 

Kitchen Cabinets And Counters 

Clutter is clutter — no matter how you try to organize it. Your kitchen counters might be the first one showing off all the electrical appliances in your home. 

You’ll want to start with organizing the kitchen cabinets to see how much space you have left for your appliances. Everyday appliances, such as a coffee maker and toaster, can be left on the counter. 

Throwing out Tupperware that has lost its lid is the easiest way to clean out this section. It’s better to purchase a new set if you have less than four in different sizes. 

Fridge And Pantry

Although I recommend cleaning your fridge and pantry multiple times in a month, there are items you can easily overlook. For instance, the items on top of your fridge or the top shelf of your pantry. 

These areas can be an eyesore in your kitchen and should be cleaned and organized often. You can visit my tips on organized pantry ideas and what essential pantry items to keep. 

Medicine Cabinet

Having access to cough medicine or everyday vitamins is important, but what happens when these items are expired? These products won’t work the same if they’ve passed their expiration date. 

This is one of the reasons why organizing your medicine cabinet is key to your health and wellness. Making sure your medicine cabinet is up-to-date on the essential products. 

Beauty Products

Makeup expires, and expired beauty products affect your face in different ways. Old makeup can harbor bacteria and cause infections as well as pink eye. 

Skincare products also have an expiration date and can cause harm to your skin. Here are some tips from the Paula’s Choice website on when to toss out beauty products.

Linen Closet (Bed Sheets And Towels) 

Organizing your linen closet makes it easier to know what you have available for your family and potential guests. Keeping things in place makes preparing for guests a breeze. 

Recently, I removed worn down towels and replaced them with new ones for my home. Not only did this come in handy with finding space for other things, but it also helped me find items I didn’t remember purchasing. 

This happens often. You go out and buy items for your home only to forget you had them in your closet or pantry. 

It’s a good idea to organize your space often to remove things you no longer use or could be gifted to someone else. 

Garage

One of the areas in my home that takes the most time to organize is the garage. It’s slowly become my husband’s storage. Although it’s a good thing we’ve been taking things out to the curb more often, there’s still room for improvement. 

The garage is a great place to store extra items that you would like to keep handy for emergencies or for upcoming events. 

There are several reasons why you should spring clean your home before hurricane season. However, one of the main reasons why you’d like to tackle the garage is for storage space. 

Paperwork

Most things in your pile of papers seem important, but they’re not sentimental items. If you’re looking for necessary documents and can’t find them anywhere, then you have a serious problem at hand. 

Knowing where you store your important paperwork is essential to organizing your home. Decluttering paper will make it easy for you to know what’s trash over what’s essential.

Sentimental Items

The last thing you’ll want to tackle are sentimental items in your home. These pieces hold value in your heart and can make you feel different emotions as you find yourself letting them go. 

Not only items hold a special place in your heart, so deciding on which ones are worth keeping is key. You can start by asking yourself these three following questions: 

• Is it something I could pass down to another generation?
• What condition is the item in?
• Can it be easily replaced?

How important the item is to you is always the first thought that comes to mind. However, will it be important to someone else in upcoming years? 

The condition of the item is important because this will tell you if it can survive another generation. Also, thinking about replacing the item instead of passing it down might be the better option if it’s not in the best condition. 

The reason why I suggest decluttering sentimental items last is that these things can make you emotional. Once you’ve worked on other parts of your home, you may feel motivated to continue the work in other areas as well. 

Having a personal care routine is important when organizing your space. Decluttering can take a toll on your mental health. As you continue to organize your home, you’ll begin to feel a weight being lifted from your shoulders.

How To Maintain A Clutter-Free Home 

Once you’ve done all the work to declutter your home, it’s best to keep it that way. You’re probably wondering if this is even possible. 

I’ll let you in on a secret. 

Most of the items mentioned above are what trigger people to create the clutter in their home. The sooner you tackle these areas, the better off you’ll be. 

Another thing to keep in mind is how liberating it is to have less things in your home and more space. Since removing unnecessary items, I’ve learned to love my house more, and appreciate the things in it. 

After replacing items that no longer served my family’s lifestyle, it made me realize how beautiful a home looks with less toys everywhere, little to no laundry to do, access to everyday items, better skincare and overall health, and so much more! 

These decluttering hacks have made organizing my home with three kids and a pup a lot easier. With help from the kids and my husband, this place has gone from house to home in the last couple of years. 

I look forward to waking up when I know I don’t have dirty dishes in the sink or a mess from yesterday’s shenanigans. It’s like hitting the reset button and taking on other challenges.

People often ask questions about organizing their space, and whether or not removing clutter helps with different areas in their lives. 

Questions like:

• Can decluttering change your life?
• Is decluttering really good for you?
• How is decluttering therapeutic? 
• What are the psychological benefits of decluttering? 

It all depends on how you feel after a shower. If cleansing yourself feels good to you, then imagine how amazing it will feel to cleanse your home from unnecessary things. 

Start with a plan, and tackle different areas of your home. One of the most rewarding things you can do for yourself is to create the living space you’ve always wanted. 

Make sure to follow along on Pinterest and head over to my YouTube channel to learn more on how to simplify your home. 

Final Thoughts On Decluttering Your Home

Living a minimalist lifestyle might sound exciting at first, but it takes work to make your home clutter free. Focusing on the present moment — what you want and need today — does help. 

The best care tip I can give anyone who is decluttering a loved one’s home is to have patience. When you think about your sentimental items, it’s important to picture yourself in their shoes. 

You can make use of the decluttering list shared above or create your own. Remember, you have your own ideas on how you’d like to organize your space.  

Whether it’s your home or someone else’s, you’ll need to take a step back from time to time. By doing this, you’ll make it easy for yourself to come back with fresh eyes, and ready to tackle the rest of your home organization project.