Traditionally spring is the time of year to clear out the clutter in your home and downsize, but if you’re a minimalist you’ll have one eye on that all year through. Still, the springtime is a good chance to take stock of how you’re doing with your minimalist homemaking and take some basic steps to bring it up to scratch. Below you’ll find some fundamental ways to get your minimalist home in order this spring.
LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE GOT
The first step to minimising your home is to take a look at what you’ve got. You won’t know how to organise things until you know what you have to work with. Doing this will also teach you a thing or two about what’s important to you and what you need to downsize, sell, or send to the recycling.
Make time and space in your life for this project. Spring is the perfect time of year to carry it out. You will notice you have items from various activities you like and things you haven’t used for a while. Separate them into categories then repack them according to relevance.
PUT LIKE WITH LIKE
Have you ever needed to find an item, such as a gift card or a photograph that you know you have, only to spend hours digging through cupboards for it, probably getting sidetracked? At times like this determination gets you through. You might eventually find what you’re looking for but it could have been a whole lot easier.
The secret is to organise like with like and to do that you first need to look at what you have. Always separate your items into clearly marked boxes. One for gift cards, one for photographs, another for old toys, and so on. This way you know exactly where to find an item when you need it. You save time and declutter your mind as well.
BEAUTIFUL STORAGE BOXES
Part of the difficulty of minimising your luxury home in Kansas city is by finding places to put everything. Usually this only becomes an issue either when your home is overflowing with clutter after you have just moved into a Cami Jones & Company home. Don’t let this happen. Instead get ahead of the game with some beautiful storage boxes.
Plastic container boxes are always a good idea. They are sturdy and long lasting, and if you put a label on the outside then it’s fairly easy to find what you need. A better idea is to use clear plastic storage containers. These don’t require any outside label as you see what’s in them, even when they’re stacked in the cupboard.
SHORT/LONG TERM STORAGE
If you want to be a true minimalist you need to prioritise your home. There’s no point in having your summer camping gear near the front of your garage through the winter, equally, why have ready access to a snow-covered when the sun is burning in the afternoon sky. What you need is a system.
Use your storage boxes to establish this system. Clear storage boxes are often easy to stack and organise. Decide what you need short term and make it easy to access. Once or twice a year you can reorganise these boxes easily meaning you know where everything is at those times of year when you need them most.
STOCKPILE WHERE NEEDED
OK so stockpiling isn’t exactly a minimalist idea – or is it? A big part of minimalism is using your organising skills to create more time and space in your life. One way to do this is to ensure you have the things you need in the places you need them most. You don’t want to run out of paper in the home office, or surface cleaner in the kitchen.
The best way to identify the items you need to stockpile is by running out of them. Allow yourself to experience the frustration of running out of certain items in your home, you will then establish what you need and where those things need to be when you need to use them. You can then confidently stockpile them and put them in relevant places.
BORROW AND GIVE AWAY
A big part of being a minimalist is only using as much as you need and no more. It’s a philosophy that can apply to every aspect of your life and be equally effective. When you apply this thinking to your home and decluttering in the spring it raises the question of what you can give away and what you can borrow.
Giving things away – either to friends or to charity – is a very useful and ethical way to downsize your home in spring and contribute to someone else’s livelihood. Borrowing is also an excellent strategy of minimalism. It allows you to obtain useful items from friends or your local community and use them for a time, without having to invest your time or space.
SENTIMENTAL BELONGINGS
Nobody said a minimalist life was going to be an easy life. In truth it isn’t. The reason it isn’t easy is partly because you have to clear out sentimental belongings or find a new purpose for them. You might have an old store of belongings inherited from your family, this could be cutlery, furniture, or antiques. You might not want them but they have sentimental value.
If you can’t bear to part with them you need to find some way of making them useful in your minimalist home. An object in your minimalist home that doesn’t have at least two purposes is dead weight that could be free space. However, there are plenty of ways you can creatively repurpose sentimental belongings to keep them in your life and make them pull their weight.
EVERYTHING HAS A PLACE
Once you have minimized your home this spring it’s time to organize it so that everything knows its place and you can easily continue your minimalist lifestyle. Inform your family of what goes where and the rules around putting things back where they came from. It might seem a bit robotic at first but it will make all the difference to the ease of your homemaking lifestyle.
Kori
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This was beautiful Admin. Thank you for your reflections.