How I Created a Calmer Home

Since I started my social media free month I’ve found myself with a lot more spare time, which has been lovely!

I’ve used a large chunk of this time to finally get a handle on the state of our house. It was by no means a mess beforehand; I think I’d perfected the art of having a home that appeared tidy but had clutter hiding EVERYWHERE. In our living room footstool, in every drawer and cupboard, under our spare bed, throughout the house in various Ikea storage boxes.

We moved into our house in August 2016 and we moved with a lot of stuff we probably didn’t need. I moved in alone, with the help of parents, siblings and friends whilst Jonny was leading a field trip in the Himalayas and was totally overwhelmed by the process so ended up just stashing a lot of stuff. Finding homes for things rather than properly sorting through the stuff we really needed or not.

Fast forward to this month and I discovered the Marie Kondo show on Netflix. I’d tried a while ago to KonMari our previous home but stalled pretty much straight after I’d sorted through my clothes. This time round, however, I was more determined.

It’s been almost a month in the making but I’ve finally sorted through everything in our home. I found the KonMari method of taking everything in one category out and sorting through the things that spark joy really helpful. I didn’t go as far as thanking items for their role in my life, and some things that don’t spark joy but are a necessity needed to stay such as cleaning products.

Now I’m (almost) finished, everything has a home. We’re 20 bags and boxes lighter. Our local charity shops have done very well out of my decluttering and we’ve made just over £40 from old textbooks and books that were never going to be re-read. Weird as it sounds, I feel much calmer at home now. There isn’t that nagging thought that I need to just sort out the kitchen cupboards or that I really should declutter the stuff from our storage boxes.

The only category left to go is the sentimental stuff. Photographs, old diaries, wedding paraphernalia, trinkets/souvenirs from various trips, a plethora of old birthday/Christmas/anniversary cards etc. I’m a little stumped as to how I go about dealing with this lot. How do you organise your sentimental bits and pieces? I could really do with some ideas on how to tackle this last area of our belongings!

9 thoughts on “How I Created a Calmer Home”

  1. Your post has definitely inspired me to start watching the Marie Kendo tidying show on Netflix. In fact I watched a couple of episodes this after noon. 🙂
    Sentimental stuff, that’s a difficult one.
    Is there any of it you can throw?
    Maybe you can make a scrapbook of some of the things you really love.
    Some cards you could cut up and make into gift tags.
    I keep my photos in albums, though I must admit I have loads now!
    X

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  2. Heh this rang so many bells with me – I did my clothes early in the year but have just stopped since then. I think I need to watch a few more episodes to give me the drive to go on – I know some of the later ones have other aspects, like paperwork, not just clothes primarily. Can I ask where you gave your old textbooks and books to? I usually give books to charity shops but I doubt they’d be interested in my old textbooks and it would be nice to make even something back on them when they cost so much to begin with! C x

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    1. Good luck if you do decide to carry on with it 🙂 I used Ziffit to sell our books. I compared on them, webuybooks and musicmagpie and they consistently offered the best price (and accepted a wider range of texts) than the others x

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      1. Gosh I haven’t even heard of that service… Thank you! (A few hours after reading your post, I started to sort through our document files – just talking about it clearly helped!) x

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  4. Sounds like you’re putting the extra time to good use! Perhaps if I gave up social media for a bit, I might finally get our pictures sorted, framed and up on the wall, haha! I’m pretty good at dealing with clutter – I just don’t have anything, except stuff you have to keep, but I’m a very tidy and organised person so good at putting things away! I’m also not very sentimental so find it easy to get rid of things! I scanned all the old photos I had so I only have digital copies now and I don’t keep old cards. The only thing I do keep (and I don’t really know why!) are gig / event tickets…. I just never want to part with those so they live in a box in the loft cupboards.

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